The Nether Rippers
by nimmieamee
Summary: Seven months after Ultimecia, Rinoa, Irvine, and Selphie become enmeshed in magical double-dealings in Deling City. Meanwhile Squall, Zell, and Quistis find themselves on a faintly ludicrous assignment for former headmaster Cid. As the questions pile up in both cases, the only answers seem to lie in old myths, children's stories, and their old enemy: Seifer Almasy.
1. Chapter 1

March 20th, some time after the war with Adel.

The children of the orphanage were going to have a story. And it wasn't going to be like one of those nice, boring little stories Matron always told. Her stories were always things like: _What's That In The Sky, Bartz?_ and _Yuffie Learns To Share_ and _Celes Goes to the Theatre_ and _Edward, This Is No Time To Sing!_ These stories had trite little morals, or else they conveyed basic, tedious information a baby could master. They also made you sleep well. They were always relayed in Matron's gentle, melodious, lulling voice. You knew nothing bad could happen in them. Everything was resolved right away, no loose ends. There were no monsters or dark twists or double-crosses to speak of.

They were _dull_ stories. Matron, not having a cruel bone in her body, was a terrible storyteller. The only person who really liked her stories was Zell.

Though everyone liked Matron, so the only person to ever come out with it and tell her that her stories were bad was Seifer.

But today they would have a better story. Cid was here.

Cid was rounder and crinklier than strictly necessary for his body type and age. And craggy-faced, not handsome at all. He wore sagging military jodhpurs that made him seem like more than a mere pencil-pusher, which was what Matron said he actually was: not much of a fighter these days. He'd never gone as far as he could have with his gunblade (which she forbade him from showing to the children of the orphanage, which made every single child despair and declare that they would die if they never got to see it, except for Zell, who wouldn't have wanted to see it anyway). These days, Cid was just a kind of secretary.

But he told the best stories. Cid could summon up horrible stories, stories that left you wide awake all night, stories that left you shouting contradictory things: stop! Don't say anymore! But also: why are you stopping? Keep going! We have to know what happens next!

Cid brought something for everyone every time he came. A camera for Matron.

"Hey, are we all gonna have to pose for a picture?" said Seifer.

"I hope not," muttered Squall, into the crook of Sis's arm. But they did have to. Matron made them.

And then a sparkly barrette for Selphie and a Deling City-made Cactus Jack in-a-box for Irvine. They agreed to share them both because Selphie really wanted the Cactus Jack, so Irvine wore the barrette rakishly behind one ear for a week, after which it was lost, and they had no choice but to share the Jack.

"Cid, you know they're just gonna break it, right?" said Seifer.

"Selphie's crazy crazy crazy," Squall agreed, but relayed this information to no living person directly, just to the colony of spiders that lived in the wall next to the fridge.

A smiling plush chocobo for Zell. It rattled and shook and buzzed and lit up the boys' room like a nightlight when you put batteries inside.

"Good, he needs baby toys," Seifer said dismissively.

"It even looks like Zell," Squall told the stove.

Seifer actually heard this, and agreed. Rather vociferously and for the next fourteen years.

A genuine child's tool box for Quistis, which was the envy of the orphanage for the next month or so. It had everything – a play hammer, play nails, play saw, play wrench, play spackle that was really just a kind of play dough.

"She's gonna be so boring, Cid. Why'd you give that to her? She's just gonna use it a coupla' times and put everythin' right where it's s'posed to go in the box and then not let anybody else touch it," Seifer complained.

"We can steal the pieces 'n use them for weapons," Squall informed the window.

And that was exactly what happened.

Ellone had a doll in fancy old Dolletian dress, with pretty blonde hair, made of porcelain, with tiny tiny shoes that were be-ribboned, and her own mirror, and her own purse, and her own beautiful scarlet overcoat, and her own porcelain male companion in knight's garb, and her own old-fashioned sorceress staff for summoning eldritch creatures of Hyne from the deep to destroy her enemies.

Initially Seifer said nothing, impressed in spite of himself. Then, after a minute. "Cid, is that even _allowed_ to give to a kid?"

"Sis should put it away where we won't break it," sighed Squall.

Then came time for Squall and Seifer's gifts. Cid made a big production of it; these two children were clearly his favorites. Good, sweet Matron loved and liked them all in equal measure. But Cid simply loved them equally; he _liked_ best the two that always came running (slowly trailing, in Squall's case) up to him every time he visited. They were, in some sense, less likable, less adoptable than the rest. Everybody knew this. Squall was an introverted slip of a thing that crept along addressing not other human beings, but more often the moon at night, or the grains of sand on the beach, or the blades of grass in the courtyard. He drifted behind Sis like he existed on some other plane, calm and quiet, voicing only one thought for every fifty he actually had, which made people nervous. It seemed unnatural. While Seifer was loud, fussy, childish even for a child, impulsive, stubborn, thoroughly nasty when he set his mind to it – the epitome of a Difficult Kid.

But Cid adored them both.

"You won't believe what I've brought for you two…" he said, lifting up his hands excitedly. "Now, boys—"

"S'not gonna be gunblades," Squall told the floorboards presciently. "S'never gunblades."

"Right?" said Seifer.

Cid heard this exchange. He paused. He said, "…Er."

"Probably gonna be somethin' dumb like a train set," Seifer told Squall.

"Choo, choo, no thanks," Squall told the curtains.

"And then it'll just end up in Selphie's hands," Seifer complained. "Am I right, Squall?"

"Selphie's a jail," Squall said to his own shoes. "F'r all the toys she breaks. That we can't never ever play with _again_."

"Um," Cid said. "It's a _gift_, boys. Don't you at least want a gift?"

"Not if it's not gunblades," said Seifer. "We've had this talk, Cid."

"Prison guard Irvy," Squall said glumly, still stuck on the vision of what would happen to some lame toy like a train set. "Traps all th' toys in Her hands." He addressed these thoughts to something, but probably not to Cid or Seifer or anyone present. Possibly just to the air.

"Tell ya what," Seifer said, "Give us a story."

"Call it even," Squall offered, making the offer very clear to Cid's shins.

"I dunno about _even_," said Seifer, a natural at the thuggish shakedown. "Call it about… half even. You still owe us at least one gunblade."

"When did I ever promise two gunblades?" Cid said, thrown off. "You both know Matron wouldn't let me bring even one gunblade here, or even a paring knife, so—"

"Better be a good story," said Squall, ignoring Cid entirely and focusing instead on the fireplace poker.

"Nether-rippers!" said Seifer.

"_Nether-rippers_," said Squall.

When they put their minds to it, even if Seifer's mind was aimed too directly and too brutally at shaking down Cid, and Squall's aimed at all the spaces in the room that _weren't_ Cid, they knew they could break him down, force him into telling the worst, the best, the most awful, the most wonderful story of all. _Nether Rippers_.

Unfortunately, they often set out to do this forgetting that the other children, with preferences of their own, might throw off their excellent union, their terrible alliance. Zell, in particular, was no fan of Cid's stories. He'd been standing by the door, halfway in the kitchen, halfway in the playroom, and when he heard mention of the Nether-Rippers he burst into tears.

"No," he said, stamping his powerful chubby foot. "No, no, no, no, no!"

This summoned Quistis, who Seifer in particular often suspected was training herself up to be a kind of fun-sucking Guardian Force. There to back up all the babies, to give strength to the weaklings, and to destroy any prospect of happiness that the stronger children at the Orphanage might achieve.

Squall concurred, but not in so many words.

"We can't hear about the Nether-Rippers again!" Quistis said, loudly and imperiously. "Zell couldn't sleep for a _week_."

"Good," Seifer retorted.

"Makes him stronger," Squall told the kitchen table.

"Now, children…" Cid began.

Quistis's shouting brought Irvine and Selphie down on them.

"We gonna hear about the Nether-Rippers again?" Selphie said, her eyes growing wide. She hopped from foot to foot. "Let's do it! No, let's not! Well. Yes! Let's do it! Only they're _scary_. Let's not! But let's do it anyway!"

"…don't think I wanna hear that story again," Irvine said, looking worried. "Unless Sefie wants to. Then I guess I do."

Sis trailed in, having secured her dolls in a secret place. She said, "Why don't we just read _Lightning Looks For Her Sister_ again?"

"No!" cried every single child in the room.

Except for Zell, who had cried himself into a heap on the floor by this point. He raised his tear-streaked head hopefully and nodded. "Boxer's cool."

"That boxer in that story is _stupid_, with stupid ideas and a stupid face and a stupid coat," Seifer said dismissively.

Zell began crying again. Sis and Quistis began to chide Seifer. Seifer began to shout at them for being horrible fun-killing jerks. Selphie made it known that she thought everyone but Irvine was a jerk. Quistis began yelling at Selphie. Irvine began yelling at Quistis. Squall pulled up a chair at the kitchen counter and informed the counter that everyone here was very loud and also they were all horrible jerks, every last one.

Matron walked in.

"What did you _do_?" she demanded of Cid.

Cid, standing forlorn and terrified in the center of the kitchen, shrugged. "Nether-Rippers?" he said, by way of explanation.

When Matron next spoke, her voice was very low and soft, but everyone heard it anyway, even above all the noise, because when Matron spoke, you listened. It was a kind of hidden terrible power Matron had. Matron said, "No. I don't think so. That frightened most of them last time."

Everyone in the room looked relieved at this pronouncement, except for Seifer and except for Squall. Seifer stomped his foot and dislodged a loose floorboard. Squall scowled at the counter.

"We have _Steiner's Big Day_ that we can read tonight," Matron offered.

Groans from everyone but Zell. Selphie and Irvine began to look repentant, regretting their earlier waffling about the Nether-Rippers. Seifer smirked at them, superior, then remembered that his story choice had lost out, so he became angry all over again and balled his hands into fists and sat on the floor and hit one of those fists against the loose floorboard.

For Squall's part, he only told the counter, very seriously, "Would rather lose all my hearing than read _Steiner's Big Day_ again."

Matron and Cid glanced at him, alarmed.

"There's also _From Sewers to Sky Piracy_," said Matron.

At this, even Quistis became regretful. That one sounded like an interesting book, but it was seventeen pages of political dithering that went over their heads, with a very annoying protagonist and very little sky piracy to speak of. Quistis thought the moral was that war was bad? Or something? But even she wasn't really sure.

"Even the sky pirate in that book thinks he's too cool for it," Squall muttered.

"Can't blame him," said Seifer.

Cid took in the sea of regretful and put-upon faces (and Zell, still sniffling into the floor). He glanced at his beautiful wife, who was tapping her foot in annoyance at him. He looked down at his bag, where one brand new deluxe train set sat forlorn and abandoned and unwanted. He said, "Tell you what? I have an idea. I'll tell you a whole new story!"

Immediately, the children became transfixed. Seifer stopped pounding. Zell stopped crying. Selphie stopped tangling her barrette in Irvine's hair and just let it dangle limply behind his ear.

"I don't know that—" Matron began.

"You have to make dinner anyway," Cid said. "And you deserve some time off from these rascally little gangsters!"

"_I'm_ not a—" Quistis said.

"You are," said Seifer.

"Y'kinda are," sniffed faithless Zell.

"She so is," Squall told the counter.

"We all are," Ellone said fairly, settling the whole thing. "We're orphanage gangsters."

"Who are going to straighten up! Live right! Go bathe themselves!" Cid said, realizing that this was his moment to take command of the whole unruly lot. He injected military precision into his voice. All of the children straightened up right away, even Seifer. "Ellone! You're the boss. See that they do it well! You're squad leader! Seifer, B-for-Boy Team command. Then both squads reconvene at the boys' nursery. Nineteen hundred on the _dot_!"

"Yes, sir!" said Irvine, impressed in spite of himself.

"Then," Cid said mysteriously, "We tell the story of…"

"Just make sure it's not—" Edea began.

"The Duchy of Lost Children!" Cid boomed.

"I was afraid you were going to say that," said Edea.

She could not have made the story sound more promising, more intoxicating, if she'd tried.

"I have _Tidus Plays Blitzball_," she said, making a last-ditch effort to save the children from Cid's storytelling.

"No!" cried every last child, even Zell. Even Zell hated that one. And even Zell was interested in the new story, if also fearful of what a Duchy of Lost Children might mean for his good night's sleep. Still, he submitted himself to Seifer's bossy manhandling in the boys' bathroom with much less crying than usual.

At nineteen hundred on the dot they assembled to hear the story. Matron had filled the house with the smell of homey chicken-cactuar soup. This did nothing to quell the excitement spreading among the children. Cid was already in his arm chair when they reconvened. He was still a short, gentle, ugly little man, but he'd somehow made himself seem mysterious and horrible and powerful.

He lifted a finger and said, "This is a story of Hyne."

The children glanced among themselves, confused. Was this a religious story? Had Cid tricked them into a lesson? Many began to look mutinous at the thought. Cid picked up on it and lifted his hands out placatingly.

"This has no moral!" he assured them. "That's why they never tell this one. No moral at all. No use to tell in church or at school.

"Now. People believe that the ground beneath us is a dead thing. But Hyne knew better," Cid said. "Hyne was born from the earth, from a marriage of wild moon monsters when they hit the earth's surface and the orderly rays of the sun, that gave those monsters thought and magic. They moved about the earth and died there, and their magical bones became embedded deep beneath the ground and attained new life, and this became Hyne. Born out of the cauldron of the earth. Out of the—"

"Netherworld," whispered Seifer. "Where the Nether-Rippers are."

"Shhhh," said the others.

"No, no," said Cid, "Well, yes. But this is a different story. A different take on the Netherworld. Or let us call it Underworld. People say the Underworld is just home to dirt and worms, but it is not. It is the heart of our planet. Just as in the heart we have secret thoughts and desires and terrors, so too in the Underworld are packed valuable jewels and metals and teeming lava full of life, and also horrible beasts to beat us back from these things. The Underworld is the great lump deep inside that pumps to keep the earth alive, a land where magic sunlight was buried within the strong moon monster bones, and where the sunlight and bones became lava. Lava lets itself escape, now and then, bubbling up in volcanoes, releasing, bleeding out onto the surface through the capillaries at the tops of the Trabia mountains. This was how Hyne came to be. He was bones that were melted into one great person, the first person. And he didn't come from the sun or the moon. He came bleeding out from the center of the earth.

"The Earth had designed Hyne to be a perfectly balanced being, moon and sun, magic and strength, wild monster and orderly light. All in one. He was like all the other wonderful things the earth produces, gleaming rubies and carbuncles, emeralds and delightful diamonds, metals to makes weapons with. This is why we call him God. Because he was greater than the things he found on the surface. First, he found actual sunlight, which blinded him initially and gave him a headache. Sunlight in its strongest form, not melted down and contained as it is in the ground, but simply pounding away at you, is a horrible, conquering thing. It leaves you aching and thirsty. It did this to Hyne. So Hyne split the earth with a metal blade, and up bubbled the secret hidden springs underneath the world, making the oceans and rivers for him to drink.

"Next Hyne had to contend with the moon monsters. These are magical beings called down to the world by some unknown force. They still plague us today. Though they were Hyne's cousins, they were capable only of savage, impulsive thoughts. They had not been tempered by the ground, as Hyne had been. So Hyne struck them down, and for a hundred years he battled them, until their numbers dwindled.

"We know the old myth now. Hyne became tired, and fell asleep, and to keep the monsters at bay he used the earth to make more people, companions for himself, to do his work for him while he rested. But when he woke, the people had multiplied, and they say that Hyne—"

"Burned up all the children!" Seifer crowed.

Zell gave a squeak, and buried himself in his chocobo.

Up came Cid's finger again. "That's what they _say_," Cid said. "But I've been somewhere, long ago. Long ago, I chanced to visit the horrible magic city of Esthar—"

Gasps from all the children, save Ellone, who made a face for some reason.

"And there they tell it differently," said Cid. "There, they say he did not get rid of the children at all. Hyne woke, and was surprised to see so many new people. But he did not hate them, initially. The people were like him. They had come from the ground. They were powerful and wonderful bits of life that had once been buried. Hyne had dug them up and brought them to the surface, and at first they loved him. And Hyne, too, loved them at first. For he had come of the ground, too. At one time they had all been ground, been connected. So he called the people his sisters and brothers, and believed they were all the same.

"But they were not the same. The earth will give us topazes and sapphires, tourmalines and amethysts, and all these things are very different. So too with the people. Hyne's creations were not identical to him. They had minds of their own. They made a poor army, always squabbling and expressing their own opinions, and going against the commands Hyne gave them. Some of them were honorless brigands from the start. Others, real diamonds at first, until they let themselves become cut into vagabonds, rebels. Many turned against Hyne, and many more simply did not accept his brotherhood. They preferred to be their own beings.

"This enraged Hyne. Never had he considered that he might feel as he did when the people rebuffed him. Lonely. He had always been _alone_, of course. But for the first time he began to be afraid, because now there were other creatures in the world who could think as he did, and yet they did not. They thought their own thoughts. All except the small ones.

"You see, the people had devised a way to make newer, smaller people. I won't tell you the details. You're too young—"

"Aw," said Irvine.

"Shhh," said everyone else.

"These were children," said Cid. "And children are very open. They find it easier to connect with others than adults do. This why we have to tell them stories, to teach them ways to think for themselves—"

"That sounds like a moral," Selphie said warningly.

"Sorry, sorry," said Cid. "But the point is: the children accepted Hyne. They still trusted him and loved him. They followed his commands, and gladly became his army. But this enraged those older beings that had turned against him. So Hyne gathered up the children and retreated to this very shore, to a great castle he built for them. And there he prepared them for battle. At first, it did not occur to Hyne to worry for their safety. He saw the children as rightfully willing to die to keep the world all connected. And in fact they were. They wanted to do just that.

"But there was one problem," Cid said. Then he stopped, put his hand to his brow. He shook his head, almost mournfully.

"What?" Seifer asked him.

"Yeah, Cid, what was it?" Quistis said.

"Tell us," Squall demanded of his quilt.

"It is very hard not to care for children," Cid said. "Children are not like monsters. They are people. And when they enter your life, if you are not careful, you will begin to love them. No one had ever warned Cid about this—"

"Cid?" said Seifer, suspicious.

"Hyne," Cid said quickly.

Seifer could ridicule you horribly if he found you going soft on him.

"I mean Hyne. No one had ever warned Hyne. So he began to love the children, and when he looked over his battlements and saw the rest of the people turning the metals of the earth into swords, pikes, weapons, he realized how awful it was to sacrifice them. So he didn't."

"What?" said Seifer.

"He didn't," Cid said. "Hyne was magic incarnate, remember? Moon magic and sun strength. Or was that sun magic and moon strength? Either way, he had more power than the people suspected. And when they went to retrieve their children, with blades and maces, Hyne did the best thing he could do for his beloved army. He sunk his duchy, his castle, and all the children in it, deep within the life-giving earth."

"He buried them?" Quistis said, horrified.

"He saved them," Cid said, "Or so he thought. He believed he was sending them to a time and place where they would always be safe, always be connected to him. Back beneath the harsh, chaotic world. To the heart of things."

There was silence.

"This," Cid finished, "Is what we call the Duchy of Lost Children. All people are descended from the beings who turned against Hyne. But our cousins, the loyal ones, Hyne sunk beneath the earth. The Underworld took them back in. Swallowed them up again."

Zell began to cry.

"C'mon," Seifer said, unimpressed. "That's not so bad."

"He _buried_ them," said Ellone.

"No wonder people ended up rippin' off his skin," put in Selphie.

"He wasn't bad, though," Squall told Zell's chocobo. "_He_ thought he wasn't."

This became a point of contention. To Irvine, Selphie, Quistis, Zell, and Ellone, it was clear that Hyne was bad. Unforgivably so. To love children and line them up into an army did not sound like real love at all. Besides, Hyne's flesh, the part of him left after his strong skin had been surrendered to humanity, the _magic_ part, had turned into sorceresses. And sorceresses were Bad. Everyone knew that.

"They're not so bad," Seifer protested.

Seifer had recently watched a movie with a very beautiful and sympathetic sorceress in it, and been very affected by the whole experience.

"They're not," said Squall.

Squall hadn't liked the movie as much. It had made Sis sad. It was just that Squall sometimes suspected that Matron was a sorceress, and this was solid proof that sorceresses could be good.

She was, and they could be.

She chose this moment to walk in. Everyone was fighting. Or, well. Everyone was fighting with _Seifer_, sole Defender of Hyne (for his part, he thought sinking into an adventure beneath the earth wouldn't be so bad anyway. It was better than being burned up). Only Squall was not fighting with Seifer. He was simply occasionally corroborating Seifer's points, and addressing this corroboration to a mountain of pillows.

"_Cid_," Edea said, exasperated.

"This is good," Cid said defensively. "They're thinking for themselves."

Edea reflected that Cid was lucky she loved him.

Edea managed to quiet the children and shuffle them back into the kitchen for dinner. How? Special sorceress powers, no doubt. No ordinary human woman could have calmed down even just Seifer, let alone the whole orphanage gang, when they got going.

"Come on," she said, a touch of special powers in her voice, "All of you! It's your favorite soup tonight, and then rest."

Whining from the children.

"Hush, hush," Edea said. "No complaints. Every body needs rest." Then, to Cid, in an undertone, "Even if every time a certain _someone_ visits, he looses the Alps on them and I spend the night warding off bad dreams."

Cid hung his head. He followed the first troop to the kitchen. Seifer and Squall were last out of the room.

"I wouldn't mind goin' down into the earth," Seifer insisted stubbornly.

"S'Nether Rippers down there," Squall told him, the first time Squall had directly addressed anyone since this morning, when he'd informed Sis that he thought most people were a headache and she was the only exception.

"So what?" Seifer said. "You scared of Nether Rippers?"

"You're scared," Squall shot back.

"I'd kill 'em with my gunblade," Seifer said.

"Run 'em through," said Squall.

"Crunch up their bones," said Seifer, with satisfaction. "Bet I could kill more than you."

"No way," Squall scoffed.

"Way," said Seifer. "Bet you couldn' kill a Nether Ripper if it stole yer girlfriend and tore up yer house and killed yer mom and spit in yer face."

Squall eyed him balefully. "Could too."

"Yer _on_, then."

"_Boys_," Matron said warningly.

* * *

Years later.

It was March 20th again, only this time it fell seven months after the Ultimecia War. That war had reduced far-off Northern Trabia to rubble. But no longer. They'd had seven months to work at the place, and so Trabia was beginning to struggle past the status of 'burned-out, depressing shantytown.'

This was nice.

It was also largely due to the efforts of the woman who'd bombed the place to smithereens, though, and that was less nice. From the local Trabian perspective.

Kind Edea had gone haywire, wrong. And, ultimately, gone powerless. And hated. The local Trabians did not want her here. They called her a witch. She wasn't, not anymore.

But this made very little difference to the locals. There was no way to spin the story that didn't lay some of the blame on her. Cid had tried. But the truth was, there was no point. She and Cid were no longer a united force, a marriage of sensible kindness and exciting and foolish romance. Edea had moved beyond him too many times, gone to where homely, small Cid Kramer could not follow. She'd gone and become possessed without him. And recruited knights for Ultimecia without him. And murdered presidents without him. And blown up Trabia Garden, and so on.

Their relationship wasn't in the best place right now.

He still adored her, of course. But it was uneven adoration. She found, horribly, suddenly, that she couldn't quite reciprocate it anymore. Not to the same extent.

She looked over an old picture of him once she was alone in her hotel room. Not just a picture of him. A picture of all of them, taken with the camera that he'd given her. Left to right: Cid and Seifer, Quistis and Zell, Selphie and Irvine, Herself, Ellone and Squall. Cid was holding Seifer. Seifer looked annoyed, but had submitted to it with all the grace that his rough four-year-old self had been able to muster.

Edea felt a powerful sense of guilt slide over her. She covered up that side of the picture with one long-fingered white hand. This left Quistis and Zell.

Quistis! So beautiful, and kind to the others, and _good_. An essentially good person. Always Edea's lieutenant, back then. Always willing to look out for the weaker ones. She'd been adopted early, for being so beautiful and so good. But her adoptive parents had not been very nice. They'd just been available and looking to buy a beautiful child. Edea had gone with it at the time. She'd believed, somewhat foolishly, that a child like Quistis could make a home anywhere.

And she'd had bigger things to worry about then than Quistis's home life.

She stretched a finger over that side of the photo.

Next came Selphie and Irvine. One whose new home she'd destroyed. Another who'd been left remembering the orphanage for years, but with no way to get in contact. He'd tried, and Edea had instructed Martine to gently rebuff him, because she'd assumed this would be safer for Irvine in the long run. It hadn't been.

Edea shifted her palm this time, covering up one, two, three, four, five, six faces.

Next was herself. She covered that one, too.

Then came Ellone, isolated and miserable for years, trapped with the White SeeDs. There the guilt was _definitely_ too much.

The only one left was Squall. And he was doing well. So well. Edea felt her heart swell at the thought. True, she'd done less than she would have liked to bring about his success. But neither had she contributed to his unhappiness. She could say, honestly, that she'd done right by him. Squall would now go down in history, eternal, forever a mark of true courage in battle.

Well. That was nice.

Wasn't it?

And that was the last thought Edea had before someone tapped her shoulder. She whirled around.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, you came after all. I wanted to talk to you. I… I learned a lesson, after all this. And I wanted to say—"

The blade pierced her just above her shoulder. Her vision went black.

* * *

"Oh, look, Squall," Rinoa said. "My friends from school!"

It was a week earlier – March 13th. Friday the 13th, and Squall Leonhart was not a big believer in the superstitious, but he ought to have been, because it was clearly not going to be his day.

They were in Gryphon House, a landmarked mansion in Deling City that also housed Rinoa's old school library. Squall had never been much of a reader, aside from the required Garden training manuals and Weapons Monthly and the like, but Rinoa inhaled books like they might crumble into dust before her very eyes, so here they were. She was here for two in particular: Cloncio Achilleviam's very rare _The Duke_, a Dolletian renaissance-era political tract that had landed its author in prison for most of his life. And _How To Keep From Making Enemies While Still Successfully Manipulating People_, a bestseller among the Galbadian elite.

Also basically anything on sorceresses from the Galbadian continent. Anything. Literally anything. She'd worked her way through Esthar's resources in an alarmingly short time, but it seemed that where a sorceress grew up could influence how their powers developed. Rinoa was, regrettably, to her mind, Galbadian by birth and breeding. And so it only made sense to come to Galbadia, even if most of the really useful books here had doubtlessly been burned or consigned to Vinzer Deling's private library.

Rinoa was a sorceress, a politically-minded one if not a very good one. She hadn't been one long enough to be a very good one. She only knew a handful of spells. She had to teach herself, because every sorceress was different enough that even someone who'd been a sorceress for a very long period, like Edea, couldn't often explain how Hyne's power would manifest in another person. The first really worthwhile spell Rinoa had inadvertently learned was invisibility, three months into the whole sorceress thing. But she couldn't extend it to other people, so she didn't use it often. She stuck by her friends, and wouldn't have left them standing around in a lurch, staring after where she'd stood moments before. That would have been a nice sorceress trick, she always said. But it wasn't a very nice person trick.

Invisibility becoming her first perfected (okay, nearly perfected) spell probably said something about her. Namely, that she was perhaps not enjoying life as a well-known sorceress. And it definitely said something about how unfair the universe was that the way the spell worked, for Rinoa, sometimes involved her erupting into a brilliant display of white feathers before vanishing. For absolutely no reason. The feathers didn't _do_ anything. They were just needlessly flashy. This was the other reason she didn't use the spell very often.

Four months in she'd learned some basic telekinesis, which she still couldn't quite control. It was more of a hindrance than anything else. Sometimes she levitated her dog, who seemed to enjoy it. That was the only perk.

Then came full mastery of flight, a natural extension of her telekinetic abilities. Rinoa had almost been lost in the far reaches of space this one time, so she didn't actually like that either. She worried irrationally that she'd float up and never come back down again.

After that she realized she could sense magic used anywhere within a few hundred meters of her location. That was the slightly uncomfortable headache she always seemed to have when in B-Garden; she just hadn't realized it was anything but a headache while at B-Garden, because almost everyone there was using GF magic all the time. But when she'd come back to Deling, on magic lockdown thanks to Sorceress Edea's takeover, any soldier's Scan and Cure and Fira hit her with sudden discomfort. Someone was casting in the depths of the library right now, probably illegally for all she knew, and it gave her what felt like a soft, irregular tap-tap-tap across the front of her skull. Not painful. Just sudden, off-putting, and unpleasant.

And that wasn't the oddest side effect.

One morning, two months ago, she'd woken up speaking and writing flawlessly in some unknown language, possible Middle Trabian, or else a very early variant on Estharian. Maybe even pre-Ancient Centran, which was crazy, because she hadn't even known there was a _pre_ that had come before the Ancient Centrans. She managed to infect some of their friends with it. They stood around babbling in Ancient Centran until it wore off. That had been interesting. But mostly, to Rinoa's mind, annoying. She'd never been so embarrassed in her life.

And yet it wasn't by far the worst manifestation of her powers. She could also mute people. Permanently. Or at least until she decided to take it off. No echo screens, remedies, elixirs, esunas, or treatments made a difference; it all came down to Rinoa's will. That scared her, and so all their friends pretended it didn't really scare them, but it obviously did. Only Squall was unfazed. He usually was, when it came to Rinoa. He'd sworn he'd never be afraid of her, a personal challenge, and as far as everyone could tell he seemed to be meeting it.

This was Squall. He never backed down from a challenge.

Rinoa, too, thought Squall would go down in history. If only because of sheer stubbornness. It was not in Squall's nature to give up. Tenacity was his number one quality. People thought it was silence, or a propensity for stunning victory, or else courtly knighthood and inner nobility. But his tendency toward silence – his girlfriend was discovering – was simply a byproduct of a stunningly lonely childhood full of abandonment. And victory had to do with fate and the alignment of the planets and hard work and friends. And his inner nobility was, to be honest, something people just liked to imagine about him. He didn't concern himself with it very much. He told her very often that people were essentially morons.

Tenacity, though.

Only once in his life had Squall ever given up. On people, that is. On humanity. On any kind of human connection. He'd effectively sealed off any kind of interest in others, or desire for their wellbeing, and he'd done this stubbornly, thoroughly, perfectly. He did nothing imperfectly. It wasn't that he was a perfectionist; it was just that he tended to be better at nearly everything than almost anyone else, to an extent that almost made Rinoa jealous.

But he'd still given up. And he was in some way ashamed of it now, though the shame was rooted in his unconscious mind, Rinoa thought, because she could feel enough of her knight's emotions to know that he carried that shame with him, but he never admitted it to her. Possibly the strange mechanisms of Squall's overactive, tenacious brain kept it there, motivating him without his knowledge.

He would not give up again. Giving up was not in his character.

Even if sometimes, like right now, he clearly sorely _wanted_ to.

"Your friends all hang out in their old school library?" Squall said.

"That is a little weird," Rinoa allowed.

She called out to her friends. They called back. The general noise they produced left Squall blinking in distaste.

Rinoa moved to greet them, but Squall did not, and since her hand was on Squall's arm, she mostly moved half a foot in their direction and then stopped, realizing that the person she was holding had suddenly taken on the implacable qualities of one of the library's many decorative statues.

"How many of them are there?" Squall forced out, after a minute.

"Looks like all nine in my old class," Rinoa said. She said this primly. She felt like she ought to consider apologizing to him for having so many unexpected friends. But she was thoroughly convinced that she should not _have_ to apologize for having friends.

"Nine!"

"No, look. There's Missy from class B, with that red book. Ten, I guess."

Grimly: "Ten."

"That's nothing. There are about a fifty students in the whole school at a time. That's a whole fifteenth of the Garden population. Or something like that. So many people, huh? So many."

Squall glared at her. He suspected she was having fun with him. She was.

"You should come greet them with me," Rinoa said. "You don't think it's too much for you, do you Squall?"

She didn't make it sound like a challenge. Much.

"I can do this," Squall said.

He could, too. She believed in him.

Plus, she suspected that after it was over he'd call in to _his_ friends (all four of them, which was the number of friends Squall generally assumed a sensible person had) to complain bitterly about the whole thing.

* * *

While Squall was so struggling, someone – not a particular friend of Squall's, since the list of Squall's friends was fairly short, and this person wouldn't have been interested in being listed on it anyway – raised a mud-splattered hand at the rear door of the orphanage, and knocked.

It was a pale hand, underneath all the mud. Long-fingered, as though designed for greater things than mere knocking, but also calloused, a fighter's hand.

"…_Cid_," the person choked out.

Cid did not live at the orphanage, not formally. He was now living nearby, enjoying his retirement. But he was not at his official new residence, and neither was his wife, the witch (not that this person wanted to encounter the witch), and so it became necessary to seek him out in the environs.

It must have been a truly terrible necessity. Cid's guest was clearly in no condition to go wandering around Centra. Besides their general griminess, which obscured their pale hair and made it hang limp, greasy, and filthy, in fact they looked as though the ground itself had swallowed them whole and spit them back out again. Mud-encrusted boots, mud-endcrusted pants, mud on their long, battered coat. Mud in their wounds, which dripped a trail of blood to the orphanage door.

"…_CID!_" they tried again.

This was clearly a very unlucky person. But perhaps the stars had aligned for them, for once. Cid was inside the orphanage, and heard the second shout. He went, gingerly, to the door, and opened it a crack, and then opened it wider when he saw who it was.

"…Cid," said this person, falling into him. He was barely able to catch them in time. "Crater… In Kash…"

They coughed violently, hacking up blood or earth or both. It stained the front of Cid's shirt. Kind, ugly Cid could not bring himself to care.

"In… Ruins…" this person said mournfully. "In…the…desert…."

"Tell me," Cid said urgently, putting their face between his hands.

"_Cid_…" they said. "He…"

"Easy now," Cid said gently.

"He said…to…tell you…

"_Nether Rippers_."

* * *

This is probably going to be very slow-going. Drop me a line if you think you know what's going on. Me, I'm not so sure myself.


	2. Chapter 2

Later that day, Squall did call his four friends. This was a big new thing for him: reaching out to people. So Zell, the one who'd taken the call, felt they had to be sympathetic.

"Rinoa has friends," Zell said. He nodded at Squall's image on his fancy new Estharian vidphone, and crossed his arms like he disapproved of Rinoa having friends.

"Duh," Selphie said.

She took a sip of her milkshake and waved at some passing Estharians. She didn't know them. And they probably didn't recognize her; she was traveling incognito. But then maybe she did and maybe they did. She liked to get to know everyone, and everyone invariably got to know her.

"Everybody has friends," she continued. "Honestly."

Zell and Irvine shared a look. After a second, they brought Squall's grim phone face into the loop. It became a series of three-way looks. Quistis noticed them doing it and invited herself in. Four identical looks. Of disbelief.

Everyone did not have friends. Selphie had friends. Selphie managed to make friends with everyone.

"I mean, imagine not having friends," Selphie mused, oblivious to the circle of looks around her.

Selphie made, on average, six new friends every morning. Often they were people. But sometimes they were puppies or moombas or marlboros. It was hard not to be Selphie's friend. And probably better for your general health, in the long run. You didn't want to be Selphie's enemy.

Now, on the other hand: Irvine. Fairly easygoing. Not going to give you a hard time even if he didn't like you. But Irvine had made only six friends in his whole life, way back when he'd been a kid at the orphanage. And then they'd all forgotten about him.

Quistis did not have many friends. She had groupies. They were not the same thing. They tended to steal her possessions. Rig up cameras in the training center shower when they thought she might be in there. Collect around her at lunch and gaze at her creepily. Disregard her express wishes regarding her private life, inviting people she hadn't seen in years to drop by without informing her first, just because these strangers from her past might reveal some marvelous Quistis Trepe secret that the Trepies felt was rightfully theirs.

When, to be honest, her biggest secret was that she secretly hated Trepies. The Trepies were not her friends.

Zell, by contrast, sometimes wanted very much to make friends even with people whom he ought to have hated. Friendliness was a part of his nature. As were extreme hyperactivity, a tendency towards defensiveness, a sense of righteousness that sometimes overrode social cues, the odd moment of perceptiveness that often left people off-balance and looking to strike back, and a pale face that flushed wonderfully red when teased. Zell did not collect friends. He collected bullies, and also people rolling their eyes at him. A lot.

Squall was simply not very friendly. Before making these four friends, he hadn't had any to speak of. The closest he'd had was Seifer, his rival. Seifer Squall regarded on some level as a manifestation of his own need to challenge himself, possibly even a very frustrating part of Squall's darkest mind that had sprung up and taken human form. This had enabled Squall to welcome the challenge – the closest thing he had to a friend. Not as someone he was particularly certain existed independently from him or had any kind of valuable inner life. Just as a being who echoed Squall in enough ways and challenged him just enough to register as vaguely existing somewhere out there in the ether, where Squall ended and the thoroughly bothersome universe of other people began.

The people who wrote worshipful articles about Squall in the newspapers, in places like Timber and Winhill, would never have been able to understand this. They believed that Squall had to be, deep down, a friendly person: able to see the essential humanity in others, consumed by romantic passion and deep feeling, essentially loving and charitable and sociable.

Squall assumed these people were morons when he bothered to think about them. But usually he didn't bother to think about them, because he had four friends and a girlfriend to occupy himself with, and they were a lot of work already in his opinion. They not only existed – they lived. Independent from him. Capable of leaving at any second. The whole business was very messy, very difficult. Particularly since he took to friendship like he took to everything else, with a sort of dour stubbornness, making a heroic and arduous task out of it.

He could not understand Rinoa having so many friends. It had seemed to sap up a lot of energy, talking with them. Firstly, she had what seemed like a thousand or possibly ten friends; too many to take on, in any case. Like a swarm of clinging, annoying elastoids attacking all at once. Secondly, she hadn't even seemed to like them very much. She spoke with them in a bizarre code, all pointed references and childhood nicknames and inside jokes that no one seemed to laugh genuinely at. It had been entirely unlike the direct dealings that Squall had with people at Garden. Rinoa's friendships with these people were not straightforward; there were no clear rankings and no order of command. They engaged in what, to Squall, seemed like political double-speak, as bad as what any Deling City official could throw at you.

Of course, her childhood friends had been the children of high-ranking Deling City officials, so maybe that was part of it. Squall's childhood friends had been... Well. File not found. And his current friends were forthright mercenaries, like he was.

"Really," Selphie was saying. "Not having friends. How sad would you have to be—"

"Maybe you're trying!" Zell said.

"It's not your fault if you're lonely," said Irvine. "Everybody gets lonely."

"Why would you want to be friends with those people anyway?" muttered Quistis.

"Friendship seems like a lot of work with no guaranteed reward," offered Squall.

Everyone stopped to stare at the phone instead of staring at Selphie. Even Selphie stared at the phone. They expected Squall to add something along the lines of: "Oh, but obviously I'm really happy to be friends with all of you." But he didn't. He did throw in a "whatever" when he started to suspect they were all looking at him. They sometimes had unrealistic expectations for Squall.

Case in point: the next thing someone (Quistis) said was, "Oh, we were invited to the Presidential Palace for lunch, and Laguna asked after youspecifically, and—"

Squall said, "Caraway just came home. I have to go."

This was a lie. General Fury Caraway was away meeting with the Deling Interim Commissioner. He'd been home long enough to put Rinoa in a terrible mood and to order her and Squall into separate rooms. This order went entirely ignored, as he was dealing with two of the only people on the planet who refused to be intimidated by him in any way. He'd also barked several strange father-to-potential-son-in-law observations at Squall, a sort of Rinoa care manual, composed by someone who clearly did not know Rinoa as well as he thought he did. Even if Caraway had been home, Squall would not have made any kind of time for him unless absolutely necessary.

He just didn't want to have a discussion about Laguna right now.

Laguna was classified somewhere in Squall's mind as a distant relation. Squall was always very stiffly polite to him when they met up, but they rarely met up, because Squall often avoided him altogether, which – mind you – was not giving up on Laguna, because Squall had no realistic connection to Laguna, because Laguna had never bothered to discover that Squall existed in the first place. So really, if anyone had ever given up, it was Laguna.

Who was also (Squall felt it necessary for people to know) a buffoon.

Squall had weighed the pros and cons of getting to know Laguna in his mind. He could see no obvious pros.

"Okay, but Squall," Zell said. "Just listen. He needs—"

"And the connection is bad," Squall said shortly.

"The connection seems fine to me," said Selphie brightly.

"It's Deling City. All this nighttime."

"Interferes with your wireless satellite connection?" said Irvine.

Caught out. Squall could now see four challenging faces through his fancy new Estharian vidphone. Four people who he suspected wanted him to open up even more. To have a father for a friend. To have five friends. Six friends. Endless friends. On and on and on and on. Forever.

When, really, he was self-aware enough to know he didn't work like that. He had to do the opening up thing in his own way.

Squall was not opposed to friendship (at this point; quite the opposite; he saw some real benefits in human connection), but he knew his own limits, and he did not like people pushing him, and besides this it seemed to him that when other people decided you were a friendly type, the madness never ended. Suddenly you had to be friendly all the time and to everyone. And that was no way to live.

"…Yes," Squall said. "What do you know about the Deling area?"

"I lived there for thirteen years," Irvine said.

"I know," Squall said, annoyed. "Rinoa's friends were talking about you. You have quite a reputation."

"That's a little beside the point," Irvine said.

"They called you a loose man," Squall said. "A raving bisexual lunatic horndog."

That was another lie. They had been talking about Irvine. But they hadn't used exactly those words. Squall wasn't sure what words they'd used; his instinct had been to sharply cut them down and make them stop talking about Irvine. Squall might not have been friendly, but he was not disloyal, and their talk had come too close to useless gossip for him to tolerate it.

Any other person would have been delighted to eavesdrop on what people in Deling were saying about Irvine. Irvine was a notorious flirt and had trained as an assassin, so most of it was fascinating: it always involved sex and violence. As the only Ultimecia War hero to come out of Deling andnot identify strongly with Timber instead of Deling City, he cut an interesting and salacious figure for the average Galbadian, never mind what the upper crust thought of him. So they hadn't said "loose" or "raving bisexual lunatic horndog," but something close to that. Squall was paraphrasing. Partly to alert Irvine to the fact that he was some kind of dirty backstreets Deling folk hero. And mostly because he wanted to get out of the conversation.

And besides: he suspected that outing Irvine as a raving bisexual lunatic horndog would surprise exactly no one in their group. And it might even leave Irvine feeling rather proud of himself.

Unfortunately, this did not throw Irvine off. "I'm flattered and touched that they thought of me?" he said. "Still beside the point."

"And Squall," said Quistis, "Listen. You don't have to hide."

"Yeah," said Zell. "Everybody knows Laguna's your father."

He said this like it had some significance. Very very meaningfully. Zell could not do subtle, but he could do meaningful like a champ. His whole body got into it. His hands stretched out. His wide eyes widened even more. His knee tapped excitedly. He began to look like he was gearing up for the fight of his life.

Squall could only see his face through the vidphone, but he could easily envision the kind of buzzing energy he was conveying to everyone else. Zell believed things like this mattered.

But this did not matter. The word friend had only just begun to have any kind of meaning for Squall. Father was going to have to wait. It wasn't that Squall had no experience with father figures. Cid Kramer had been one of the only constants in his life, there guiding him at every step, building up Garden just as he built up Squall, and for the same purpose – to fight the threat of the sorceress.

Truth be told, if Squall was going to try and establish a father-son relationship with anyone, he was more inclined to try for Cid. Cid had some meaning in his life. He doubtlessly had some meaning for Cid.

Laguna, by contrast, was just a stranger.

"Give Sis my love," Squall said mildly. His face blinked out of view. The call went dead.

"I sometimes think we expect too much of him," Quistis said, after a bit.

* * *

"I wonder if I should have expected more of him," Cid told his patient.

He'd dragged his patient away from the orphanage, back to his home. There, he had potions and treatments and sorceress remedies Edea had brewed, long ago.

He hoped – prayed – that they would do the trick.

His patient did not reply. Unconscious people rarely did.

"Don't worry," Cid said. "I've sent word to Garden. We'll sort it out. We sort out our own."

* * *

In far-off Balamb Garden, the very next day, sixteen Trepies cornered Headmistress Xu while she attempted to eat her breakfast in peace.

"Eat" was a generous word. Xu did not eat. She did not have the time. She inhaled some coffee, glanced at a muffin, devoured half a sandwich at lunch, gorged herself on whatever was available before bed, and then repeated the process.

She was headmistress. If she stopped to eat, Balamb Garden might collapse. Or else it would revert to the state it had been in under Cid: none of the paperwork done, students running the disciplinary procedures, and possibly the creepy Shumi Guardians returning to wrench the place away from its rightful owners, the SeeDs.

Okay, Xu wasn't sure about that last one. Mostly it just happened to be a special nightmare of hers. The point was: there were far more important things to do with her time than eat.

"Xu," said the Trepies.

"Headmistress," said Xu.

"I think we all know who that position really should have gone to," said the head Trepie.

"I swear to Hyne I will revoke your club license," said Xu.

She would, too. Xu was fiercely protective of her position. She'd worked to get to it. She'd been dogged and ruthless as a SeeD cadet, but also smart. No task was too small for her, nothing beneath her attention. Every job someone gave her, she did it twice as well as expected, and with more attention to detail than it strictly required. When she'd made SeeD, she'd gladly taken on not just field duties and instructor duties but also tactical support, magic studies, card club, library club, and even secretarial work. That last one – ostensibly the dullest and most pathetic job available in Garden – had been her favorite. And also the most useful, in the end. Xu was a bang-up secretary. She knew every contact, every student, dealt with every single committee and major figure.

Not always successfully. But the dealings themselves had been the end, not so much the outcome of those dealings. Being a part of Garden, an integral part, had always been enough for Xu.

"This is an abuse of power," said another Trepie.

"Also," said the head Trepie, "You've already revoked our license. Four times."

Xu squinted at her. This was entirely possible.

"Who gave it back to you?" she said, a little dangerously.

"The Commander," said the head Trepie smugly.

Ah. Squall. Xu didn't hate Squall or anything, but sometimes she really hated Squall.

Another Garden fixture, Squall handled things very differently than she did. To his credit, he was useful in battle. And loyal, in his own way. And a very high profile face right now, the focus of a lot of media attention. But he was also moody, silent, unpredictable. He was like a Guardian Force in human form, almost. Vital to their success. But he came with drawbacks, and on top of that you had to struggle to get him under your control.

Not that this mattered right now. Squall was on vacation in Deling City, probably making out with his girlfriend (another high profile headache) under her dad's nose. While Xu was here, girlfriendless, dealing with the Trepies.

"What do you want?" Xu said to them.

"Quistis Trepe is away far too often," said the Head Trepie. "Instead of working as an instructor and aiding us with her wisdom and beauty, in her divine Hyne-given calling—"

"Wow, that's not creepy at all," said Xu.

"Consider what the latest Trepe Time Radio Hour said about her!"

Xu preferred not to. She kept tabs on what people were saying about her SeeDs as a matter of course, but it was often untrue; and, more frequently, it boiled down to useless gossip.

"She cavorts with sorceresses! And loose men! And – well, Selphie Tilmitt's okay. But Dincht?"

Zell Dincht was, in a lot of ways, an embarrassingly awkward person, pretty much doomed to be on the bottom of the social totem pole until he hit his twenties and aged up into some kind of sexless instructor type. But he was also a good SeeD. And a hero. Going to go down in history. All that junk.

Not to mention inherently trustworthy. He could never lie. If he tried, you could see it written all over his body. Every Garden needed someone like that, some moral measure of the rest, who simply couldn't help but be honest. An upright local Balamb boy. Boring. Inappropriately aggressive in a teenage way. But principled, for the most part. Honestly, if Xu could get him to try for instructor, she could probably keep him here even if he got injured or decided it was time to retire from field work and get married or something (all SeeDs hit their expiration date one way or another; the mercenary life was a hard one). And he would come in handy. Garden, as an operation, ran on subterfuge and the occasional stunningly bold reveal; they existed mainly to drive out Galbadians or to kill people in the shadows. And when your company was that bad, you needed a few good eggs like Zell Dincht. Or the whole thing would collapse.

Seriously, good on Quistis for making friends with the guy.

"Wow, that is such a tragedy that she has friends," said Xu. "I'll get right on that. Now back off."

The Trepies would not back off. They did not believe Xu was being sincere. They were right.

Xu took an experimental bite of her muffin to avoid having to say anything else right away. She mused it over.

She hated the Trepies with a passion. She suspected Quistis also hated the Trepies with a passion. It was hard to tell anything concrete about Quistis; Quistis was an unreal being, the Garden postergirl, an instructor barely older than her students, the top member of the card club, the face they put on all the brochures, and therefore hard to get to know as a person. But she was still a friend.

Mind, not her closest friend. Quistis and Xu had not had great beginnings; judging from her earliest memories of Quistis, Xu hadn't thought much of her way back in the day. But once they had both become SeeDs, that had faded. Quistis was very very lovely, the kind of person who brought to mind phrases like "swanlike neck," and also she was very professional, and incredibly intense. She did things like study, and train, and plan her lessons, and grade exams, and study, and train. Sometimes she found time to be better than most people at cards. But after that? Right back to being better than most people at training. And this one time, to no one's surprise, she had helped save the world, which seemed appropriate because Quistis had to have been training and studying for something.

Still, she made time to shoot the breeze with Xu. They planned lessons together, took down arrogant students. Quistis seemed to have found her niche with other people now – Zell, Selphie Tilmitt, Irvine Kinneas, Squall and Rinoa. But she had still been a good friend to Xu in her own way. And Xu had her back, when it came to the Trepies. You had to have each other's backs. Every good SeeD learned that right away.

"I am going to talk to her as soon as she gets back," Xu said, still lying through her teeth, but attempting a more serious tone this time.

"See that you do," said the head Trepie menacingly.

"Oh, I will."

"See that you do."

This was becoming circular. And a time suck. And Xu only had so much time. She tried for pensive, just to get them off her back.

"You know, now that I think about it, it is downright bizarre that she would just…"

"Yes…?" said the Head Trepie.

"Run off to Esthar," said Xu. "With friends!'

"Right?" said a Trepie in the back.

"Using her vacation hours!" said Xu.

Xu had actually begged her to use them. Photographers kept sneaking onto Garden to try and take pictures of her. It was becoming a real problem.

"It's preposterous," said a male Trepie.

"What does Quistis think this is? What kind of operation does she think I'm running?" Xu said, injecting some resentment into her tone.

Everyone expected her to be resentful of Quistis, to want to be Quistis. It was a believable lie. Unless you factored in that one time Xu had realized that being Quistis meant dealing with the Trepies, and then you realized that nope, Xu was not crazy enough to want to be Quistis.

"She thinks she's so flawless," Xu continued, "She probably thinks we owe her for saving us or something!"

This was when the conversation seemed to go haywire, as it often did when the Trepies were involved. Like most half-brained cultists, they adored and despised their idol in equal measure, and sane people could never really tell which impulse would win out in the end.

"We owe her too much to be quantified, but what does she owe us?" said the Head Trepie. The Trepies lapsed into silence to consider the question, blown away by this bit of Trepie philosophy.

"Can we ever really answer that?" Xu said, meeting the crazy halfway and attempting to match the general tone of metaphysical bullshit that had descended over the table.

Muttering from the Trepies. Xu nodded sagely.

"Think about it," she said loftily.

They seemed to. They seemed to be thinking about it really hard. While they were engaged in using their brains (or the minuscule lumps of grey matter that stood in for Trepie brains), Xu picked up her lunch tray. She edged out of the dining hall. She went up to her office. She did not consider this making an escape because the Garden Head didn't make escapes. The Garden Head retreated to tactically plan.

She'd been tactically planning how to get rid of the Trepies for a while. Probably better to do it when Quistis was away, right? Right. Because when Quistis was here, they got even crazier, if that was possible. Unfortunately, this might take a while, and Quistis was due back from vacation in about three days.

Xu had a file on odd happenings in Centra sitting on her desk. It had just come in today. It was from former Headmaster Cid Kramer. He'd stamped it "urgent," but everyone knew that in Cid-speak "urgent" meant "whenever the Garden Head feels like it." Xu had a deep-seated affection for Cid, who was more than he seemed at first glance. But he was also in some ways an incredibly lazy person. And she was not. So she tackled the file right away, and good thing, too. Centra would be the right place to send Quistis as soon as she got back.

"Your fans are creepy. So creepy," she told Quistis during their administrative vid meeting later in the day. "I feel like I can't just expel them—"

"Okay, but can't you?" asked Quistis hopefully.

"I'm going to call them in for psych evaluations while you're away," said Xu. "I think there's honestly something wrong with most of them. It'll take some time to get through all of the evals, but I could probably prove them nuts in time. Then I could expel them."

"Misrepresenting the evaluations to kick them out? That's unfair," put in Squall, his first contribution to the meeting.

Xu snippily told him could be assigned to Centra as well, if he was going to be like that about it, because he was long overdue for a proper mission, especially since he kept turning down all their requests from Esthar. Everybody knew all he'd be doing this weekend was making out with his girlfriend under her dad's nose anyway. He could come back early on Monday and get back to work, if he was going to be prissy.

He looked at her very grimly and said that he was the Commander.

This was to imply that Xu shouldn't be pushing him around. He didn't say it outright. It just kind of hung in the air. Squall did that a lot with the things he really wanted to say. His girlfriend was a sorceress. She had a deft touch with Squall, and tried to understand him. She treated him with care and devotion. He therefore seemed to assume that the entire world could read his thoughts using these same special sorceress mind tricks.

Even though most people in the world had neither the time nor the inclination.

Xu said, "Oh, well. I guess you'll stay then. There's no fighting you. I won't even try. And it's a mission from Headmaster Cid. He wanted to see you, I think. Poor Cid. He's all alone down there, and so lonely. So, so lonely. Missing his favorite gunblader. So lonely. And now you're giving up on him, I guess."

Now, see, Squall probably didn't care much about Cid's loneliness. Xu had to assume that other people's emotions were a lot of work for him when he was clearly just at beginner level regarding his own. But he looked vaguely unsettled at the suggestion that he might give up on anything. He always took that as a challenge. He changed his mind about the Centra mission.

Xu had his number.

Mind, she'd lied to him a little. Cid seemed to be doing fine. Very busy, whenever she checked in. Even more evasive than usual. But he didn't seem to be missing his favorite gunblader at all. In fact, Cid being a crappy judge of character, his favorite gunblader had never even been Squall.

* * *

"I can get you as far as Dollet," Cid told his patient. "But you'll have to get better before I can feel comfortable putting you on a transport. Though I guess I should do it before any SeeDs get here."

His patient said nothing. His patient was asleep.

Cid said, "Xu won't risk high level people. Not with the mission report I've given her. But I just wish Edea were here. She would know what to do. Went up to Trabia. Thinks she has to make up for it."

His patient still said nothing. Obviously.

Cid said, "Sounds like other people I know, huh?"

Silence in the Kramer household.

"Yeah, sorry," Cid said. "That's a bad joke."

March 17th. Three days after the Administrative Meeting. Vacation for Squall and Quistis was over. They were on their way to see Cid. Cid was lonely. Possibly. According to Xu. But then how would she know? Who really knew what to make of Cid?

"He was an excellent Headmaster," said Quistis. She said it like she was reciting something.

"He was a Headmaster, anyway," said Zell.

They'd brought Zell along largely because Zell had pestered them over it. His mother in Balamb kept throwing girls at him, beginning with the Library Girl and ending with the freakin' bait-and-tackle girl who lived on the pier and had a glass eye. His parents were disappointed that the Library Girl hadn't worked out. Possibly even disappointed that the Library Girl had forced Zell to reconsider certain aspects of his identity.

Ma in particular thought that, heroism having been gotten over with, Zell now owed it to the world to pass on his heroic genetic material, and also to give his loving mother grandchildren. Zell had been very direct with her about the fact that this was never in a million years going to happen. She loved him, so she took it well. But, if he was being honest with himself, she was a little let down over the whole thing; and he didn't want to deal with her crestfallen expression. Or her subsequent decision to try and set him up with the guy who sold train tickets to Timber.

Zell was an honest person. Taking honest inventory of his feelings (rapid-fire, while punching the air inside their transport sub, because that helped him think), he assessed Cid. And he realized that Cid was probably, honestly, much more manipulative than Cid let on.

"Headmaster Cid never gave up on a soul," Quistis was saying. "He was patient and understanding with SeeD cadets of all ages."

"Including the really young ones already being trained to be killers, so that we could all eventually get shoved at a sorceress," said Zell. "Look. That's weird. Isn't it?"

Zell had dreamed of being a SeeD, as a kid. It had seemed so impersonal, so professional, so cool. Cid Kramer had been a far-off, distant name then. Some commander, some great thinker far above you, some gentle and wise presence who could make you strong, help you learn to fight.

And then he'd learned that Cid Kramer was not so distant. Cid Kramer had known Zell since Zell had been a tiny baby. Told Zell some of his first bedtime stories. And then cut the connection, pretended he had no idea who Zell was, tossed some memory-draining GFs at Zell, put weapons in Zell's hands, and pointed him at a sorceress.

Which, honestly, made the whole thing more than weird.

Fucked up was a better assessment.

"You're a part of it too, so there's no use acting like you're above it," said Squall, with a censuring tone. Squall probably didn't know what to make of Cid. Everything Cid had done with Zell, he'd really perfected with Squall: the golden boy Cid had always meant to force into the Commander position. But, Squall being Squall, good luck figuring out how something like that had affected him, because he'd never tell you.

"And remember how Cid was at the Orphanage?" Quistis put in.

None of them actually did remember. As SeeDs, they used Guardian Forces regularly. And GFs existed to do two things: make you an unstoppable military powerhouse, and to soak up all your memories. So they were very good fighters. And extremely poor remember-ers.

"He took us on a picnic once," said Squall, to no one in particular. "No. Yes. I don't know. Maybe?"

"Yes," said Quistis.

"Yeah?" said Squall.

"I think so," said Quistis. "He gave me a choco-back ride. No. Maybe he gave Selphie a choco-back ride."

Zell said nothing. He was still punching the air in silence. Which didn't mean he wasn't thinking. Zell was in thinking overdrive.

Squall and Quistis did not have parents. Not really. Sure, Quistis had two people who wrote her sometimes and reminded her that they had only adopted her because such a pretty girl really should have been made Headmistress or at least wife of the SeeD Commander by now. And Squall had long-lost relation Laguna, who he liked to pretend did not exist, even though this was silly, because Laguna headed up the most powerful nation on the planet.

But only Zell had a Ma and a Pa. Ma with her matchmaking skills and Pa with his unflappable acceptance and Pa with his deliberate calm and Ma with her love.

They were worth a million of Cid Kramer. They had never wanted anything out of their charge – their son – they just wanted him to be happy. Whereas, with Cid, any desire for their – his, Squall's, Quistis's, Selphie's, Irvine's – all of them… Any wish for their happiness had always been incidental to bigger things, hadn't it?

Yeah. It had been.

It wasn't like that didn't make sense. Years ago, Cid and Edea had discovered that someday a crazy and evil sorceress would want to compress time. So why worry about the emotional needs of a bunch of orphans? There were bigger things to deal with. But even so. In Zell's head there were all these slowly-resurfacing memories of Cid Kramer laughing with them as children, giving them choco-back rides, taking them on picnics...

But that wasn't Cid Kramer. Not really. Zell knew Cid Kramer. Cid Kramer had become – had had to be, maybe – the kind of man who'd done anything to accomplish his goals. Anything. Put gunblades in the hands of five year olds. Sent young men to kill their mother figures. Waited and watched and made deals with the Shumi.

He wasn't just some fat old lazy guy cowering in the corner. He was an opportunist, cunning, a survivalist, a Sorceress's Knight, Seifer Almasy the first.

Squall aside, Zell didn't – couldn't – have very high opinions of guys like that. Zell wasn't a guy like that himself. Yes, he was SeeD. Yes, he would shoot and kill and punch (mostly punch) if he was told to. But he was also somebody's kid. Which meant that he was always thinking about how other people were people's kids, too. He had a strangely powerful sense of humanity, Zell. His humanity. Other people's. He took it hard when people let that down, forgot to act human, screwed people over with no reason.

When you struck out at another person, used them in a scheme, screwed them up, threw them away, blew up their Gardens, cowered instead of defending them – it wasn't like hitting air. You were hitting something, fucking with something, with a living being. And maybe it was easy to forget that if your weapon of choice was a gunblade or a whip or your dog or something, but Zell was a martial artist. He'd chosen to be a martial artist. Because that meant you felt every hit connect; you couldn't run away from your actions. So you understood that those actions had consequences, and in a weird way you became more cautious.

And you didn't want to be the Knight or the SeeD commander. You didn't want to strike out because there was some glorious end or secret plan that might justify it, in the end. Preemptive strikes just made you the asshole, the guy who deserved a good punch in the gut, even if he had reasons for doing what he did.

Zell punched the air.

Cid, he imagined, would be a lot more solid than the air. But soft. A gunblader gone to seed.

No pun intended.

"I think he gave me a toolkit or something once," Quistis mused. "He was such a good Headmaster."

Squall sighed. He said, "Matron's the one I miss, really."

Matron was a whole other can of grat crap. Zell's punches got a little more aggressive.

Just a little. He couldn't remember Matron. What he did remember was nice. Picnics. Storytime. Chocobo-back rides. But those memories were hard to reach. He had to really try to get his GFs to give them up. And when he got them back they were hazy, changed. Whatever Matron had given him, if she'd given him anything, didn't exist as memory, just as some deep-seated impulse.

Some weird, prickly feeling that she and Cid Kramer weren't and had never been anything like real parents, not really. Maybe they'd wanted to be, at some point. But they'd become something else entirely.

* * *

"Tell me about this little group of Cid Kramer's, the ones said to be enemies of the sorceress," asked the man in red.

He said 'Cid Kramer' experimentally, like he couldn't quite get his mind around the words. A couple of times he'd said, 'Kid Kramer,' instead, because the hard k sound came very naturally to him. But otherwise the name sat on his tongue like an ugly, heavy thing. He almost felt he should be offended to have to say it.

But the person he was speaking to only shook his head in response.

The man in red took stock of him. Not a bad specimen. Dark, tall, broad-shouldered, handsome cheekbones, wide dark eyes. Nothing about him seemed to have been bleached by the sun of his homeworld; he was, unlike the two who'd been brought in alongside him, almost a perfect example of a person. The real pity was that neither he nor the girl had been the ones sorceress-touched.

That had been the other one.

So it would have been high sacrilege to acknowledge this one as anything other than a future drone, a clockwork man ticking out penance until the end of his days. After all, he'd committed high crimes during the rise of Edea.

But, at the very least, there was a kind of simple loyalty to him. The man in red was fairly sure the loyalty didn't extend to Edea, though. So maybe this creature would redeem himself yet. He certainly hoped so. He had a great deal of respect for his subject already. Electricity the prisoner bore with good grace. The whip? Very similar. Temporary poisons injected into the veins made him roll his eyes back and bear it until he sweated it out. Magical ailments of all kinds made him grit his teeth. He'd only shaken and wet himself when the Inquisitrix performed her mental tortures.

He had never once spoken. Indeed, once they'd separated him from his sorceress-touched friend, all Raijin had been willing to give them was a baleful glare, a moan now and then, and a trickle of blood out of the side of his mouth when he bit down too hard on his tongue. So the man in red held him in very high esteem.

But relationships needed to be built on mutual respect. Didn't they?

He fitted Raijin into the press. He watched clinically as the great torture machine squeezed down on the young man. Very big, very strong. And now feeling the weight of tons of steel squeezing down on him, crushing his broad chest. It only took a minute for fear to settle into his eyes. Good.

The man in red stopped the machine.

"It is commendable that you've told us little about Cid Kramer," he told Raijin. "Or the Defeater Leonhart, or any of these worthy new names. Do you know? We've even heard about them down here. Fame does spread."

Raijin coughed, spat out blood. Possibly his ribs were cracked. He said, "You took Fujin, and Seifer—"

More coughing. His lungs were probably cracked.

But this was new. A name for the great criminal, the great failure, the one soaked in sorceress magic. Cipher. What a perfect, funny little name. The man in red actually laughed to hear it, and clapped Raijin in a friendly manner, on the shoulder. A cipher could be a secret, or a kind of hidden message. It could be nothing at all. It was heavy with symbolism, with things yet unrevealed – it promised something so valuable that one had to encode it. But it could also be something, as yet, unimportant.

What a very fitting name.

Let it be told that the children of Hyne knew well whom to bless, and whom to snare.

"That almost makes me like him," he told Raijin. "And you've been a very strong, very good friend to him, haven't you? But not so for the sorceress Edea. You were no friend of hers."

He put a comforting hand on the sweaty skull with its close-cropped dark hair.

"'M not gonna tell you where she is," Raijin forced out. "Don't even know."

That seemed fair. And Raijin was such an honest, trustworthy, loyal fellow, that the man in red was charmed by his answer, and believed him.

"But what did you think of her, the former sorceress?" he asked. "What did you know?"

"She—she brainwashed him," Raijin said.

The man in red raised an eyebrow. That did not quite accord with what he knew, but he let it lie. Dropping the press any more might crush Raijin's lungs, and there went the questioning.

"He trusted her, y'know? He didn't—didn't tell us much. But he told us that he trusted her. 'Cause he knew her, way deep in his brain, once he dragged it out of the GFs. She was supposed to be his—like his mom. He trusted her. Then she got picked up by Ultimecia—"

The man in red smiled. Good. Very good. Just what he wanted.

"She says she was just as brainwashed," Raijin continued, struggling to form the words.

"Now, that has to be something of a lie," said the man in red. "Or she was simply not a very good sorceress. It takes a very weak, very small, very fearful woman to be unable to hold her own against another of Hyne's chosen."

"No," Raijin said, sounding for all the world like he didn't want to believe that. "It can happen. To any sorceress. It's not about weak. Because Rin—"

He stopped. Although up until now his face had been twisted in pain more often than not, it had never shown horror. Now he seemed horrified. By whatever he had been about to say.

Good. They were making progress.

"Yes?" said the man in red.

Raijin shook his head again, as best he could trapped between the two heavy steel blocks of the press. The man in red patted his arm supportively. Crushing him more than this might shut him up permanently. But he could take it little by little. Start small.

He seized the powerful dark arm, and contemplated grinding the wrist-bone to powder.

Rin. Rinoa. Miss Heartilly. News of her had trickled down even to here. And now Raijin indicated that he might know her personally. Very good. Raijin was an exemplary fellow. So loyal! But also so well-connected. He knew Edea. He knew Rinoa. And he probably knew something of the other one.

The man in red really was very glad to have him there.


	3. Chapter 3

Some hours later, in the Headmistress's office, the normally easygoing Irvine Kinneas was looking to complain.

Not about anything Xu could help him with. Just in general.

"They called me a loose man," said Irvine. "Me! I mean: bisexual horndog, fine. But _loose_?"

Xu didn't really know what Irvine was expecting. He was not exactly circumspect about his sexual proclivities. As far as Xu could tell, he was attracted to anything. _Anything._ If it promised intimacy, he seemed drawn to it like a bite bug to caterchipillar feces. But his work was always top-notch. He was one of six world-renowned heroes and the only person ever to make SeeD without officially passing or even considering taking the standard SeeD test. And his scores out of G-Garden were better than she'd learned to expect from G-Garden (the crappiest of the gardens, in Xu's opinion. Postwar, it was disintegrating fast in the wake of increased Deling City totalitarianism. And Xu wasn't sure she'd miss it if it shut down completely). The paranoid secret blacklists Martine had kept put Irvine at "difficult" and "friendless" but also "promising if handled well" and "a natural shot." He was a loner in a different way than Squall. He didn't put people off-balance with sudden bursts of secret romantic emotion and extreme stubbornness. Quite the opposite. Irvine was malleable. And personable and charming when he bothered to exert himself, in fact so charming that you forgot that a lot of the time, rather than acting like the shameless flirt he claimed he was, he was actually very quiet, very withdrawn.

All in all, Xu didn't hate him.

Plus, he was dating Selphie Tilmitt now, so Xu had some faith that the days of his worst sexual excesses were over and done with.

"Aaaand I don't even know why these people think they can pass judgment on Irvy. They sound like losers. They just hang out in libraries," Selphie told Xu.

"I hang out in libraries," Xu said.

She did, too. People tended to use the B-Garden library to fight and gossip and plan things, and it was a good place to overhear information. To get a handle on what was going on: the student-level view of Garden. Xu had a hard time getting students to really bond with her (was she too competent? Too Headmistress-ly? Cid had never had this problem), so she sometimes resorted to spying on them.

"You hang out?" said Selphie. "I thought you just worked all the time."

Xu tried to think of something equally blunt and rude to say back, but failed, because Selphie had offered to help sort through paperwork with her. Selphie didn't have to be doing that, so Selphie had the social upper hand. As Selphie usually did.

Though Xu suspected she was only being helpful in order to wrangle a bigger budget for the Garden Festival Committee.

Selphie was quite possibly the hardest person in Garden to figure out. A Trabia import, she was hopelessly ditzy, very clumsy when off the battlefield; and obsessed with pop culture, the latest bands, ridiculous pulp magazines about adventuring reporters, who was dating whom and who had dumped whom in the middle of a training session. She knew everybody. Everybody knew her. She published a lot of her opinions on her blog, hiding very little, and was always very direct with people. She did not seem especially intellectual or gifted. Just very improbably competent. And well-trained. Quick. Forthright and friendly; the kind of bubbly personality that you needed in a place like Garden, because in a pinch she could be counted on to hold the rest together like glue, through the sheer force of her sociability.

Xu was also not going to discount the possibility that Selphie might be a grade-A manipulator. Might be. The proof for this unlikely conclusion lay in just how many hapless innocents were now toiling away as members of the Garden Festival Committee.

Selphie was also clearly something of a romantic daredevil. Given that she was dating Irvine Kinneas.

"It's weird that Rinoa's friends hang out in libraries, though," Irvine was saying. He had his legs on Xu's desk. All Xu's attempts to get him to remove them resulted in a sleazy raised eyebrow and Selphie batting at him. Then they would retreat into a bizarre courtship dance involving Selphie faking annoyance and Irvine faking even more sleaze, so by now Xu had just given up.

Plus, he was tackling the invoices from the local T-Rexaur breeders. And the complaints from the T-Rexaur Preservation Alliance. The Alliance had sprung up in Balamb determined to end what they saw of Garden's cruel use of the creatures. Xu despised them, and hated even acknowledging their existence because she privately suspected they existed just to make her life harder. So Irvine was doing her an even bigger favor than Selphie was, and Xu decided to give him a pass.

"Thing is," Irvine said, "Not to be rude—"

"But you're going to be anyway, aren't you?" said Xu.

"He never learned not to be. He had no mother," Selphie told her. "His mother was blown to smithereens in an attack on a Galbadian outpost when he was a baby—"

"I think Matron said she just got sick and didn't get better, actually," Irvine said.

"My story's better," said Selphie, "Because explosions. And because we don't remember our parents anyway and probably never will, soooo we can just make them die as horribly as we want."

Selphie's interests tended towards the macabre. Her humor was dark. Xu thought it was a Trabia thing. They had nineteen-hour nights in Trabia for half the year. That kind of environment made for some weird personalities.

"What did you make up for your birth parents?" Irvine said.

"Thrown before Sorceress Adel and tortured because they wouldn't talk—"

"I wish you wouldn't talk while we do this," Xu said.

"—and then my dad was drawn and quartered—"

"They definitely haven't done that since the age of Vascaroon, but okay," Xu said.

"—and my mom, my beautiful mom, wasted away in an Estharian dungeon, dreaming of me and my eleven lost siblings until her dying hour."

"That's weirdly sweet," Irvine said, "But kind of dark."

"I know. I have problems," Selphie said. "I've never pretended otherwise."

To her credit, this made her a better functioning human being than ninety five percent of Garden's other tragic orphans (who made up a good sixty percent of Garden).

The others tended to think they were perfectly normal and had no social problems at all and definitely no abandonment complexes that made them act like assholes. And also that their parents were probably living somewhere but they just couldn't remember because GFs. So screw you, Headmistress, we're not going for a psych eval. We're _fine_.

"Anyway, what were we talking about?" Selphie said. "Oh, right. Rinoa's friends."

"You were talking about Rinoa's friends," said Xu. "I'm updating the budget spreadsheet."

"Wow, Xu, that sounds so much more interesting," said Selphie. "If you've got grat poop for brains."

This was such a blatantly inappropriate thing to say to the Headmistress that only Selphie, clocking in at around five feet with a flawless field mission record and a limit break that could level mountains, could have gotten away with it. That was thing about Selphie's particular generation of SeeDs. They got results, and with results came payment. Funding. So Xu put up with them.

"Okay, but, like, Xu would hang out in a library, because Xu is, you know, not a debutante or a belle of society, or a fun kind of girl," said Irvine.

"Xu is your freakin' _boss_," said Xu.

Irvine tipped his hat in her direction to show her that she had a point. But then he crossed one leg over the other, nudged some paperwork to the floor in the process, and kept talking anyway.

"But these are Galbadia's elite," he said. "Did you catch some of those names Squall dropped?"

"Like a bad STD," said Selphie. "Same as Deling's Ministers and Heads of State, right?"

"Right! And those people's kids should be in a nightclub. They should be snortin' tonberry dust in the back room of a Deling club. Like, who in Hyne's wide ass hangs out in a library unless they're poor and not cool?"

"I was raised solidly lower middle class," Xu said. Irvine, like most Galbadians, had class hangups that put Dolletian elitism to shame. "And I hang out in—"

"You don't, though," Selphie complained. "Hang out. Ever." Then she turned to Irvine. "Nerds, Irvy. Who understands them?"

This was rich, coming from a girl who ran six fan pages and knew more about advanced transportation technology than any other person on the planet.

"You know who's a nerd? Tangentially? Rinoa," said Irvine. "A hot nerd. Completely a hot nerd."

"She's our friend, so my jealous side can live with you saying that," Selphie said. "And yeah. She's a cutie."

Rinoa chose that moment to walk in. As if Xu needed more of a headache today.

"Who's a cutie?" she asked offhandedly. Then she turned to Xu, apparently the person she really wanted to speak to. "Headmistress Xu!"

"No, not her," said Selphie. "She's okay. But we meant you!"

"Aw," said Rinoa, oddly touched.

"Okay, everybody out," said Xu. "I'll just do my paperwork on my own."

Rinoa put her hands on her hips and gave the general impression that she was now planting herself in Xu's carpet and would not be moved by all the SeeDs in all the world. Since she was a sorceress and friends with five of the best SeeDs in the world, Xu could very well envision her succeeding at this.

"Fine," Xu said. "What?"

"Squall says," Rinoa began, somewhat menacingly, "That you are planning on forcing the Trepies out."

"Really?" said Irvine. This shocked him enough that he moved his legs to the floor and sat up straight. This was the first time in his entire acquaintance with Xu that Xu had ever seen him sit up straight. Xu had known him for seven months at this point. Seven slouching, lounging, sleazy months.

"Aw, what?" said Selphie. "I'm friends with some of the Trepies!"

"Sefie, my love," Irvine said, "Who aren't you friends with? You're friends with that one malboro in the Trainin' Center that always runs away from encounters."

"Sunny is a shrewd survivor," said Selphie very seriously.

"And apparently you named him," Xu said.

"I've gotta level," Irvine said, "I know Sunny. I don't even know the Trepies' names."

"Well, yeah, but who does?" said Selphie. "I mean, I guess it's on a roster somewhere."

She started poking around on Xu's desk, as though Xu were hiding the identities of the Trepies on some kind of secret blacklist, in the vein of that psychopath, Martine. Xu made shooing motions, but to no effect.

"Some of them are competent enough, though," Irvine mused. "But the competence never outweighs the crazy with the Trepies. It's a tenuous balance: competent and crazy."

Xu eyed Selphie and Irvine both at this point.

"It sure is," she said. "Now stop wasting my time and do my paperwork, or get out."

"Alright, Xu, but first!" said Rinoa, pointing a finger at Xu ominously.

She'd been suddenly reminded that Xu was in the room. Xu's room. Xu's own office, that is.

"You are being _so_ unfair," continued Rinoa. "It is an _injustice_. You can't just set the Trepies up and kick them out! There should be procedures, and systems—"

Rinoa was not just a sorceress. She was a born crusader as well. She embodied a heady cocktail of noblesse oblige, stubborness, and her own innate sense of unfairness. And so she was the first ever sorceress to do things like liberate Timber, and champion the rights of gays and lesbians in Deling City, and donate publicly to those T-Rexaur Alliance assholes in Balamb despite her boyfriend being SeeD commander because animal rights were _important_ and also she had to be _impartial_.

Rinoa wasn't a SeeD at all, so Xu shouldn't have had to put up with her. Sometimes Xu really resented that she had to put up with her. She'd actually thrown Rinoa out of Garden multiple times, but Squall kept inviting her back.

"Rinoa, you are not a SeeD," Xu said carefully. "So you do not get a say. We have had this discussion. Nine times."

"I speak for Squall while he is away," said Rinoa loftily. "And my friends speak for me."

"Right!" said Selphie, jumping up and down in an impassioned manner.

"I don't know. I'm with Xu," said Irvine. "We can't have crazy people in Garden. Really everybody should be gettin' a psych eval."

"Thank you," Xu said.

"Not Selphie, though," said Irvine. "She might not pass."

"Irvine, you wouldn't pass!" Rinoa said.

Irvine looked thoughtful. He tipped his hat in agreement.

"And even I might not pass," Rinoa continued, as though to teach them all a great lesson in humility and fairness.

Xu said, "You aren't a SeeD, so—"

Rinoa ignored her. "Maybe Zell or Quistis would. _Maybe_. But Squall definitely wouldn't pass becau—"

"Squall's a trainwreck," Selphie said, nodding. "Great guy. Such a trainwreck."

"I won't tell him you said that," said Rinoa.

"You can," said Selphie.

"It's not like he doesn't know," Irvine added, putting his legs back up and slouching back down. "Squall's self-aware now."

"Okay, but," Rinoa said, lowering her voice, "I _worry about him_."

"Are we gossiping about your boyfriend now?" said Xu. "Could you maybe not get comfortable? Because my office isn't the place to do this."

"Have you seen what the papers write about him?" said Rinoa.

"Have you seen what the papers write about all of you?" said Xu.

Seriously. Sometimes she had to remind herself that it would give Garden more bad press to fire them than it would to retain them. And that they were good SeeDs. If slightly unhinged.

"He's now going through this new phase," said Rinoa, still ignoring her, "Where he has, and I'm not kidding here, negative social skills. I don't mean none, like he had before. That was fine. He used to be able to go so quiet and professional! Like a dream! But now, on the number line of social aptitude, he is on the negative side. It's like he discovered his personality, and his personality—"

"Sucks?" Selphie said.

"No!" said Rinoa. "Well…"

"Well?" Xu said. "No. What am I saying? Don't prompt her."

"Go on," said Irvine. Probably because he was a sleazy asshole.

"We were meeting with the new Timber delegates and the Deling City representatives, and I had to do all the talking. Not because he wouldn't talk! Because when he did talk, he was the most undiplomatic person on the planet. He had the Galbadians ready to conquer us again, just to get back at him for being, you know—"

"A complete dick?" Selphie offered.

"Not very nice," said Rinoa. "Let's say not very nice. His inner self is just not very nice!"

"Shocker there," Xu muttered.

"That's why we have Xu, though," Selphie said. "To talk to bigwigs and get us money and handle all the annoying stuff that Squall can't deal with."

"Excuse me?" said Xu. That was not at all how she would characterize her job. Squall was not what motivated her. In fact, with his sparkling personality, Squall occasionally stepped in as a truly effective de-motivator.

"Well, look, do you want Squall to do it?" said Irvine.

"I—" Xu pondered this.

Dear Hyne. The very notion was terrifying.

"Right?" said Selphie. "Trainwreck."

"No, see, I think he can be diplomatic if he just believes in himself!" Rinoa insisted.

Rinoa was a big believer in believing. She was a dreamer. She thought you could get whatever you wanted if you wished and worked hard enough. And in her defense, you really could get whatever you wanted if you wished and worked hard enough. And also your father was General Caraway.

"I mean, that was the whole reason I asked him to Deling," said Rinoa. "Gryphon Preparatory alums—"

"You went to prep school," said Selphie, sounding unsurprised.

"The most exclusive prep school in Galbadia," said Irvine, sounding even more unsurprised.

"_Of course_ she went to the most exclusive prep school in Galbadia," said Xu, rolling her eyes.

Rinoa put up a hand. "Whatever! As Squall would say. My point is: alumni get free access to our library, and our library has all these books on social aptitude and how to make people do what you want by convincing them that you're nice even if you're not—"

"I never had to learn that," said Selphie. "I've just always known how."

"It comes naturally to you," Irvine agreed.

"And then, you know, I ran into my friends and…" Rinoa trailed off. "It was weird. I mean, not the Squall thing. Squall having social problems is normal."

"We won't tell him you said that," said Irvine magnanimously.

"Shut up," said Rinoa. "I just had a thought. That _was_ weird."

They all looked at her expectantly. All except for Xu, who suggested (again) that she have her weird thoughts somewhere that wasn't the Headmistress's office. But Rinoa just continued her personal tradition of ignoring the Headmistress.

"I'm not, like, super close with these people," Rinoa said. "I just grew up with them. But I would have expected to find them in the back of some club snorting tonberry dust or something. Most of them are, you know. Party animals. Not bookish. And there were a lot of things that were weird about that day, actually. It was just an odd visit."

"Well, your boyfriend met too many people and had a small meltdown over his dad," Selphie offered.

"Normal," Rinoa repeated, waving her away. "No. The thing was: I could sense magic in use. In the library, I mean. And – look – I don't want to rat anybody out to the Presidential stooges for unauthorized magic use, much less an old friend, but the fact is there are laws, and usually they're not so blatant about violating them because their parents _make_ the laws, so—"

"Magic?" said Xu. "In Deling City?"

That was a problem. Xu leaned forward across her desk and caught Selphie and Irvine's gazes. They looked grim.

"Ohhhhhhh wowza," said Selphie. "Not good."

"Violation of our ceasefire agreement, right?" said Irvine.

Rinoa looked at them, bewildered.

"I think it was probably just some people junctioning where the new Commissioner was unlikely to look for them?" she said. "Pretty smart, when you think about it, since none of the President's advisors and staff wouldn't want to have to arrest somebody at their old alma mater, and—"

"No, no," said Irvine. "See, last month Xu here did some talking with the Deling City bigwigs."

"For Squall," said Selphie, "Since he's a mess."

"For _Garden_," said Xu irritably. "I renewed the nonaggression pact with Deling City. Not going to be long-term thing. Just a ceasefire, like you said, until we get Trabia up and running. We review it in a month. It's routine at this point; you wouldn't have heard much about it."

"But you put in a new clause this last time, right?" said Irvine.

She had. The situation in Deling was complex. But to boil it down to basics: Galbadia hated Garden.

They always had, really. Cid Kramer commanded no respect in Deling City. For one thing, he was perfectly willing to take missions that revolved around stabbing Galbadia in the back. For another, Deling City had once been the greatest military power the world had ever seen. But nowadays their soldiers were shoddy. Their technology slightly outdated. Their empire? Crumbling. And a lot of that had to do with Cid, and B-Garden, and the SeeDs.

Cid and Edea had brung G-Garden into existence as a kind of compromise. Even in the early days, the Galbadians had suspected the threat SeeD might pose to them. So they'd been offered a Garden of their own, to pacify them and to keep Vinzer Deling from ordering a kill strike on what had been, back then, Cid and Dr. K and the guy who manned the front gate and some orphans they'd scrounged up from who-knows-where.

G-Garden was to have similar facilities; similar curriculum options. Like B-garden, low-to-nonexistent tuition. It would open itself up to Deling City's shadier, more paranoid elite to cover costs, a hit squad camouflaged as a school. And the hit squad was an instant hit. Vinzer Deling and his cronies had a lot of uses for private assassins, and they liked very much that Martine, Cid's rather faithless appointee, fed excess students right into the Galbadian army rather than recommending most of them for SeeD.

As long as there was a tenuous connection, a strange alliance between B- and G- gardens, Deling City had left B-Garden pretty much alone. They had operated under the assumption that anything Cid's kids could do, their own could do better.

Cid, for his part, had scrambled to keep an edge over the place. He did this through magic use. GFs. There were some in G-Garden, but not very many, and Cid conspired to acquire most of these in the end through any means possible. He'd believed that GFs would mean the difference between life and death for Balamb Garden, if ever they happened to go against an opponent as powerful as their sister school.

He'd been right. Xu had seen it happen. When the Shumi had turned on them, the SeeDs had held out – just barely – not because they were necessarily better fighters, but because they had more fluency with magic and GFs than their opponents. A skinny second-year couldn't survive against Shumi wielding natural blue magic, much less a full grown Galbadian with years of military experience, but if you equipped that second-year with Firas, Thundagas, the ability to draw, the ability to Cure, and a massive monster, to boot, the tables turned.

Xu had played nice for the first few rounds of Deling City negotiations – she'd had to; they'd taken a big hit to their feeder school out in Trabia; and half the SeeDs were cleaning up moon monsters in Esthar. But she'd brought the claws out last month. Thanks to their magic and GFs, B-Garden could wipe the floor with the Galbadian army, if they had to. And Xu was going to make damn sure they kept it that way.

"I did put in an extra clause," Xu said. "Thing is, Rinoa, they're required to turn over any new GFs they find in this period to Balamb Garden."

Irvine said, "I'm pretty sure any GFs that G-Garden personnel had came here eventually. Zona Seeker's used for training here now, not to mention Bismarck, Ramuh—"

"Right," said Xu. "We snapped up every one Martine ever tried to hide from us. It must be some new one. Deling's Cabinet has a handful they're allowed to keep in Galbadia. But the only people they've listed as currently junctioning any of those in and around Deling are a few highranking soldiers posted at the city borders."

Irvine said, "Maybe someone dragged one of those GFs back into the city to use—"

"Against the ceasefire. They wouldn't dare," Xu said. "No, if they did that? We would be well within our rights to expose it."

Selphie said, "So who's gonna be able to do magic without GFs? In the middle of the city?"

"They're hiding something. Go find out what," said Xu. "Keep it low profile if you can, but find out at all costs. That's an order."

For all their crazy, she and Irvine were good SeeDs. They went when ordered. They even took Rinoa with them. When they'd gone, Xu looked over the reports Selphie had been working on, and also Irvine's response to the T-Rexaur complaints. Perfect. Literally perfect work.

She sighed. She looked at her budget spreadsheet. It was full of mistakes.

* * *

Raijin, the exemplary prisoner, had reached his limit.

Oh, not in terms of _talking_. The big, loyal lunk kept his words in his head, for the most part, after letting slip about Miss Heartilly. Which was a shame, because any information on those who had been touched by Ultimecia was absolutely crucial at this juncture.

No, Raijin had simply reached a mental limit. And it seemed prudent to patch up his mind to some degree, so that they could continue with the interrogation later on.

It had happened like this: the man in red had broken both wrists, then both ankles, then both knees. But all the while they'd been getting along famously. Raijin even had a polite moan of pain, something very understated, suitable, as if he really was the mercenary he claimed to be. And the man in red very much enjoyed his stiff mercenary's upper lip. So as he'd done all this to Raijin. he made sure to be conscientious about little things, to wipe tears from his eyes, to rub his elbow comfortingly. And he told him all about topics he thought might interest him: loyalty, criminality, knighthood, magic.

"Sei-Seifer's more than a criminal," Raijin forced out. "And Fujin. My—my _sister_."

"They can't help you, I'm afraid," the man in red told him sadly. "A shame. A shame also that Fujin lacks the ability to receive the sorceress power, don't you think? How different your lives would have been! Now Miss Heartilly, on the other hand—"

Raijin clamped his mouth shut. He would not speak anymore on that. Mostly, he was caught up in defense and pleading for his friend, that foolish boy who'd stumbled onto so much power.

"We strive to make your friend useful as well," the man in red assured him.

Horrified, despairing, Raijin actually lunged in his bonds, _swiped_ at him.

It was like a very large, very unruly kitten taking pet against its masters. The man in red laughed.

But of course he soon sobered also, because this could not do. So disrespectful. He called in the Inquisitrix to dose the prisoner with some more toxic magic. A bout of painful insanity would serve him right. But then, on returning, he found very little evidence that Raijin was recovering from the bout.

He was screaming and screeching, his eyes wild and paranoid. His mind had been slightly shifted, cast out of rational thinking, that was all. The subconscious made to surface, the fears made to take hold, the parts of him that were sensible and capable of controlling his pain and anger banished.

Then the Inquisitrix put those parts back in, of course, but it was a harrowing process for the victim, and it seemed it would take Raijin some time to right himself.

Annoyed, the man in red determined that they had to send him to the healers. They would continue. But later. Once he'd been patched up sufficiently to withstand some more torture, of the mental and physical variety.

"Now, I know he is of the common and criminal element," instructed the man in red, to the healer they had on hand. "But to hear him speak of the sorceress!"

Well. He supposed he hadn't heard him speak as much of the sorceress as he would have liked. But still. Raijin's sturdiness, his strength, his ability to drag it on. That was thoroughly refreshing and enjoyable. The healer gazed at the wreck of him, appalled, as though she thought he might not recover. But the man in red knew better. Raijin would recover. There was a fascinating inner resilience to him, like blows and mockery and torture really meant very little to him, like he held on to some hope for something bigger.

Distantly, the man in red wondered if this was common for Kramer's group. Were they all like this? Were they this hardy, were their spirits this buoyant and strong? Oh, the Garden was no real target, not really. This was limited to the events of the Ultimecia war, to those whose minds now bore the unmistakable imprint of the future sorceress.

But what might it mean, if they did seize the Garden?

Lucky Raijin should have some fellow prisoners! And this whole time the man in red had been assuming that Raijin was unique, was special. It made a certain amount of sense to assume so; no one had ever declared that this Garden lot was, on the whole, remarkable in any way. But what if they _were_? What if they all struggled and fought and possessed vast reserves of grand loyalty?

Terrific.

"I surrender him to your care and you must take good care of him," the man in red heard himself saying, distantly.

But how frustrating it was. Their chief aims were to go unfulfilled in the meantime. And the man in red so liked spending time with Raijin, besides. His normal work, outside of handling Raijin, was really very boring, not half as congenial.

* * *

"Here we are," said Squall. He said it very grimly. Like visits to Cid were arduous personal missions that he set himself. Which this one basically was.

"So you are," said Cid.

"Cid, we've come to see you," said Squall. And if you looked very hard, you could actually see him checking it off in his head. Visit Cid Because Cid Is Old And Lonely And Xu Said I Wasn't Up To The Task.

Check. Done. On with the mission.

"That's very nice, Squall," Cid said. "Come back tomorrow. I'm busy right now. Congrats on renewing the nonaggression pact!"

Then he shut his door in Squall, Quistis, and Zell's faces.

There was silence for a second.

"What the hell?" said Zell.

Squall, who had been momentarily stunned to be so completely dismissed by the man whose Garden he had saved, snapped back to attention and banged on the door again.

"Cid!" he said.

"I'm very busy. So nice to see you!" came Cid's voice through the door, muffled and far off.

Squall stopped banging. He just stood there for a minute. His normally blank-if-handsome features took on a slightly petulant cast, so that suddenly he seemed less Squall Leonhart, Garden Commander, and more Squall Leonhart, offended eighteen-year-old.

"Well, this is weirdly typical of Cid," Zell muttered. He punched one of Cid's windowpanes in annoyance. He accidentally dislodged one of Edea's flowerpots. It shattered, and her poppies thumped sadly on the ground.

Zell didn't even feel that bad about it.

It _was_ typical. As Headmaster, Cid had had a tendency to do things like summon you up to his office, only to run off mid-meeting after saying something ominous about how the future needed his attention. Or to show up just as you were about to get chewed out by a Shumi guardian and gently get you off the hook, only to vanish just when you wanted to ask him important questions like why the Shumi guardians were all assholes in the first place. Or to send you on missions that risked international strife with Galbadia, home of a fellow Garden, only to cower and hide when this left the SeeDs consumed by internal conflict.

That was always Cid's way. Not a very good Headmaster or a terribly courageous leader. Just the only one they'd ever had.

Squall crossed his arms and glared furiously at the door, as though he could get it to open by anger alone.

"Oh for—let me," said Quistis. She rapped professionally a few times and said, "We've been assigned to the mission."

Silence. Then some scratching sounds. Then the sound of Cid drawing the bolt. The door opened to show his face through a crack.

"That's a bit below your paygrade," he told them, ultra-seriously. "It's just a few sinkholes. But I have complete faith in you! And of course I'm very flattered you would come all this way just to help me. Help yourselves to the spare rooms in the orphanage. Bye now. See you tomorrow; we can discuss it then."

Then he closed the door again, and didn't open it after that. They circled his house - a small, rambling bungalow Garden had flown out for him as a retirement gift, so that he and Edea wouldn't have to rebuild their shabby orphanage, and so that they could have a nice spot away from adoring crowds (mostly for Cid) and angry mobs (mostly for Edea).

Cid had thoughtfully drawn all the curtains and locked the back door.

They retreated to the orphanage. Squall was pissed; Quistis was carefully neutral; and Zell wanted to ask about the sinkholes, because he'd only joined the mission as an afterthought – technically he still had vacation time – and he hadn't had a spare second to take a peek at their objectives, what with Pa practically throwing him at some guy who was moonlighting at the Balamb garage.

"Xu said he was lonely!" Squall said, upset in that blank way of his that didn't quite show on his face, but still got you feeling kinda queasy because you suspected he was about to go off his rocker and do something like cart an unconscious girl to the hidden city of Esthar just to show the world how pissed off and secretly brimming with romantic turmoil he was.

"Xu's full of it," Zell agreed, just to pacify the guy. He headed towards Quistis's pack and flipped the top open. He found the mission files. Quistis didn't notice, because she was doing her best to talk Squall down in a mature and level-headed fashion, although if you looked at her eyes you could see that she was also annoyed by the whole thing.

"We all knew Xu was throwing us an easy mission so that she could figure out what to do about the Trepies," Quistis said. "It was a favor to me, really."

"She's unfair," Squall said. "She does personal favors for her best friends. Not objective at all. And then she—"

"I don't know that getting rid of the Trepies would be just to my benefit," Quistis hedged. "Or that I'd call her my best friend."

Zell tuned them out and flipped through the file. There wasn't a lot to flip through.

**Re: Sinkholes in the Kashkabald**  
Referred to: Arismendi, Xu  
Client: Kramer, Cid  
Objectives: Figure out what the heck is causing sinkholes in the Kashkabald  
Client Comments: It's v. worrisome! We planned to retire to Centra and now there are these sinkholes! What if they spread to our land? Thanks kids. By the way you are doing a great job. HEADMASTER CID

Seriously?

_Seriously_?

"She's actually really intense," Quistis was saying. "All she does is read and play Triple Triad, and read some more. And she's married to her work. I mean, what a nice girl. But so intense. Too intense."

Squall looked like this was doing absolutely nothing to improve his mood. Zell decided to interrupt.

"The Kashkabald isn't even anywhere _near_ here," Zell said.

"What?" said Quistis, thrown off balance.

"This mission," Zell said. "It's bull. The Kashkabald is on the other side of the continent. Where no one lives."

Quistis and Squall blinked at him.

"Yeah," Squall said. "So what? It's a favor for Cid."

Doing favors for friends was right out with him, but apparently Cid was a different story.

"It might destabilize the continent," Quistis added. "You know, down the line. In a seismic way."

That was not in keeping with what Zell had learned about seismic activity, but since Quistis had been an instructor and all and probably knew more than him, he let it slide.

"Say it might. That would probably be years from now," Zell said. "Why ask SeeD to investigate it now?"

"Cid likes to prepare?" Quistis said. "He spent, what, more than a decade prepping for Ultimecia? Building up Garden just for that?"

"So now he wants to prepare for Centra to get swallowed up by a massive sinkhole?" Zell flipped the down the top of her pack in disgust, with altogether too much force. "What can we do about that, anyway? Come _on_."

"Well," Quistis admitted. "He may know more than he's letting on. It does seem a little silly."

"We don't ask questions," Squall put in suddenly.

"What?" said Zell.

"We're _SeeD_," said Squall. "We do our jobs. No questions."

Zell looked at Quistis. Quistis looked at Zell.

Neither of them was really into contradicting Squall. Selphie might have said something. Rinoa might have gently hinted. Irvine might have at least offered a pensive and questioning look in Squall's general direction. But Zell and Quistis? They didn't have it in them to go against Squall.

Both of them had once had massive crushes on him, for one thing.

And for another: he was the leader. He had just kind of effortlessly assumed the position. And he was more imposing than he knew. And he was right, actually. About SeeD, and what they were meant to do. That was how they had defeated Ultimecia and saved the world, right? No questions. Just getting the job done.

Squall fingered his gunblade.

"Typical Cid," he muttered. "We'll talk to him tomorrow."

* * *

"Oh, dear," Cid told his patient. "I didn't think they'd send this bunch."

His patient coughed up some blood in an effort to say: "_Dollet_."

"Soon," Cid said. "I'll find some way to distract them tomorrow morning; we'll get you out to Dollet while they're occupied."


	4. Chapter 4

They took the train to Deling City even though Selphie wanted to take the Ragnarok. Selphie always wanted to take the Ragnarok, actually, but they couldn't do that without attracting attention anymore. It was a highly conspicuous vehicle and they were highly conspicuous people. So Rinoa and Irvine talked Selphie down to train travel. She loved trains. She loved most things in the world. As the old Dolletian saying went: she danced with the joy of life.

Irvine was, by contrast, something of a secret sadsack. He couldn't quite understand her. That didn't mean he liked her any less. The Timberi frontier poet and sometime-chemist Reo Wenwist used to write extensively on this phenomenon—

(And cut Irvine some slack here; yes, he'd read the guy. He wasn't a nerd or anything, but he'd grown up poor in Deling City, unable to afford Tonberry Dust. So for the first few years of his life, he'd read. Mostly naughty magazines. But when he found himself in a library by some strange act of fate, then other stuff too, because libraries didn't stock naughty magazines.)

—and Wenwist described every interaction as a potential attraction of opposite charges. The more…Oh, Irvine was no poet. He figured you could call it opposite-y? The more opposite-y that the charges were? The more opposite-y they were, the more they attracted each other. This phenomenon wasn't simply for tiny particles and subcutaneous organisms. It applied all across the board, a law of Hyne. Opposite charges were attracted to each other. And Irvine and Selphie were opposites. Irvine had no inner joy to speak of, not any that wasn't a front; underneath his breezy airs and good looks he sometimes felt he was a negative, a big old void. While Selphie was brimming with positivity. It charged her up and made her a brilliant, happy, bouncing, energetic being; she couldn't even keep it inside her. Ergo, they'd bonded. She swapped him some of that joy for his…well. His something. Something was keeping her with him. Keeping up their bond.

It had been a bond formed in the cradle, Irvine thought. Matron said Irvine had been four months old when he'd come to the Orphanage. Selphie had already been there, a little older than him. And Matron hadn't confirmed that they'd hit it off right away, but Irvine didn't need the confirmation. He knew they had. He just knew it was true. He wasn't always the most intellectual soul, not even after reading all those books. But he was a secret romantic. And so some things he just took on faith.

See, aside from memories of Selphie and the orphanage; all Irvine had, really, were memories of being sort of empty and lonely by comparison. His childhood had been lonely. His training had been lonely. Even his first time had been lonely. Irvine had lost his virginity at almost fourteen, and he figured it had to have been loveless sex – not great sex, not yet; that would have been unrealistic. He'd been too young.

Bexley Kerr, 'Sir' to Irvine and 'Dad' according the adoption papers, would have rolled his eyes to hear of the event. Declared it typical, immoral, irresponsible, because Irvine was, in most respects, a complete failure and really a Bad Kid. There was the dullness to him, the secret sadness. There was a kind of failure to be upright and strong, a failure of masuclinity that no sexual exploit could make up for. And then later there would be womanizing, too; too many sexual exploits, like Irvine was setting out to be as shameful and low-class as possible. Though one had to know Irvine for about a month to figure out that it was a front – one small sliver of his personality that he'd blown out of proportion, just to keep people from seeing the rest of him.

But back to virginity. Almost fourteen. A Galbadian soldier – tall, for a woman, with bright eyes and powerful arms. She'd been guarding some diplomat who was meeting with Martine, only guarding him rather half-assedly, letting the guy wander the Garden while he himself sprawled on the couch in the waiting area, and there she'd seen Irvine, skinny but tall for his age, stewing because he'd been sent to the Headmaster's office. Again.

"You look like you're being held captive. What'd you do?" she'd asked.

And Irvine had said, "Nothing."

"Everybody says that," the soldier had said, waving a hand like she understood well the follies of youth. "If you'd done nothing, you wouldn't be here. You did something. Probably with a girl, right? Let some cute young thing into your heart, like a fool. And it went horribly wrong, I bet. You're at the age for it."

Irvine _had_, actually. The girl had been named Selphie Pardo when he'd known her and no one had ever told him who her adoptive parents had been, so he wouldn't have been able to track her down as a Tilmitt even if he'd tried to. That was how it had gone horribly wrong. Separate families, in the end; separate continents, even. And he'd been around three when he'd let her into his heart and first decided he loved her, so it wasn't his fault. You weren't responsible for what you did at three. But he hadn't been about to protest or reveal that. Not to some random Galbadian soldier who was only flirting. Irvine had already understood flirting at the time; he'd been a quick learner.

Irvine had said, "No. I did nothing. Just nothing. No shooting people. No shooting grats, even. No GFs."

He'd been enrolled at Garden under extreme duress. Bexley liked that they farmed their graduates out to the Galbadian army and had steamrolled over most of Irvine's protests.

The soldier had thought Irvine's natural squeamishness naïve, which it had been, and cute, which it hadn't been. So the first encounter was probably fairly uncomfortable; not enough to put Irvine off of sex completely, but somehow enough to make him shove the memory at the GFs, later on. He and the soldier had still exchanged contact information, and met near the Deling City Hotel for next three months, and she'd blown him beneath the underpass near the Presidential Palace.

Irvine could not remember her name.

He'd given the name up when he'd finally agreed to junction. And the memory of his actual first time. There were other memories he'd preferred to keep, things more important than an act he'd do again and again and only get better at. That was fine. Irvine had known he might lose stuff to the GFs.

Now, Irvine had told his friends that he hadn't junctioned GFs until meeting them. It wasn't _strictly_ true. He hadn't junctioned for real battle until meeting them. He hadn't junctioned for especially long periods until meeting them. He hadn't junctioned enthusiastically, surrounded by the four of them, living reminders of a past that he was until then in danger of losing to the sway of the GFs, until meeting them. Meeting them had not been his first time. Er. His _other_ first time. His GF first time.

Irvine had some previous experience with GFs; that was how he'd known they caused memory loss, right off the bat. He just hadn't wanted to admit how he'd known. It was not a terribly nice story. In the first place, it involved a lot of selfish forgetting. Not like Selphie and Zell and Quistis and Squall's inadvertent memory loss. But a deliberate, manipulative forgetting on Irvine's part.

And in the second place, it mostly revolved around how much of a lonely loser he'd been growing up. The story goes as follows:

The upper-level, more talented cadets at G-Garden had been weird and alien from the start. After a few months Irvine had realized why: they didn't have memories. Some lost their childhoods; parents were constant surprises they rediscovered in the mail every week. Others lost what they'd eaten the day before; they experienced for the first time the same Deling cafes over and over. And some lost their first memory of meeting Irvine, again and again, and looked at him strangely whenever he was familiar with them. And, with some pestering, an instructor finally took Irvine aside and told him why all this was happening.

GFs.

G-Garden didn't have many GFs. On paper, they had none, because Cid Kramer was paranoid about that stuff. Martine drilled it into them that if they ever came into contact with Cid's kids: "Don't let them _know_. Tell them we have _none_. "

Why?

Because GFs meant power. And when Cid down in Balamb caught wind that G-Garden had stumbled on some new source of power, he inevitably decommissioned that power for use by his own kids. He said it was because Galbadia Garden had always been meant to focus more on technology than magic. But GFs had their uses in the realm of technology, too. Some could help refine weapons components. Some, particularly those found in the desert near G-Garden, were like weapons – the magic one got from them was weak at best, but when they unfurled their bodies all one saw was a vast wall of mech. And some boosted physical strength and rolled out a shield against magic; these were particularly prized by Martine, as he saw in them the key to defeating Cid's kids, should it ever come to that.

Irvine had passed his physical tests perfectly, so if he could have been browbeaten into sticking to the program, he might have been a useful asset to Martine, might have been trained up to despise Cid and Cid's disciples. So Martine had come after him mercilessly for refusing to practice with their lone remaining GFs. Irvine had held out for a while. Then, he stumbled onto Florlina Drinnaks' _. Not a naughty magazine, like most of his light reading. Just a book. But a useful one._

Drinnaks saw GFs not as strange memory suckers that took up space in your brain. To her, they were more than that. They were almost people. GFs could think, apparently. They could be offended. They could challenge you, and judge you for being weak.

There was something _to_ them, like with people.

Irvine was not successful at getting close to people or making people really care about him; he only could charm them, keep their attention on him for temporary periods, that was all. But as a cadet he'd only junction the GFs for temporary periods. So that was all he needed. When, on pain of eternal detention, Martine had talked Irvine into letting one Zona Seeker into his brain, Irvine had taken a deep breath, cleared his mind completely (he'd run through this so many times in anticipation of junctioning that it was instinctive; it had to be), junctioned, and thought his first thoughts in the GF's direction.

"Don't take my memories."

Florlina Drinnaks said this almost never worked straight out. You had to be junctioned to them for a while, so that they obeyed your commands effortlessly, in order for it to work. And by then, of course, they would have already taken your memories – maybe even your memory that GFs could take memories.

Zona Seeker's physical form had a ribcage made of metal, and in its mental form its voice came forth sounding very tinny and mechanic and high for such a forbidding beast.

_What…are…memories?_

Right. Not promising.

"Like, my knowledge of what I did before now. For example, what I did this morning—"

And as soon as that had popped into his brain, there went his memory of the morning: no doubt brushing his teeth, pulling on his uniform, eating by himself in the caf. He still had the memory of the memory, of course. The knowledge that it had been there and he had done _something_. But the events themselves? Gone. Irvine had realized he would have to try a different tactic. What else did he have?

Oh. Gab. Charm.

"You seem like you're being held captive. What'd you do?"

_Are…you…mocking…me?_

_…_

_Fool!_

_Do…you…know…my…power?_

"Not as such," Irvine had thought evenly, making sure to keep calm. Breathe in, breathe out. He'd trained himself not to be nervous.

There was no reason to be, after all. He'd studied up on everything Florlina Drinnaks had to say about bargaining with GFs. So he was reasonably – reasonably – sure that he was on the right track. "I really wanna know. I can relate. I'm stuck here myself. At G-Garden, I mean. I don't wanna be here; you couldn't pay me to go into the Galbadian Army."

_…Coward._

Zona Seeker had been a fairly powerful GF, but no prize in the personality department.

"No, really," Irvine had thought. "We're gonna be stuck running drills together, aren't we? We might as well get to know each other. What's your story?"

_I…don't know_.

"You don't need to get creative with it or anything. Just give me a name—"

_Zona Seeker…_

"Okay, not that. I already know that. Parents? Loved ones? GFs you're close to?"

_I….don't know_.

"You don't have parents?" Irvine let slip a few memories of Bexley Kerr as a reference. And as bait.

_Bexley…_

_Very stern…_

_He was taller than me._

_Now he isn't anymore._

_I don't like him_.

"Right," Irvine had thought. "Here's the thing. Bexley's not yours, my friend."

_He is!_

Florlina Drinnaks believed – correctly, as Irvine had come to discover – that something had made the GFs complete and total amnesiacs. They had few memories of their own, or else theirs were locked away somehow. GFs were straightforward creatures, and memory was, after all, not straightforward. It was your brain playing tricks on you. Imperfectly recreating something you could never get back. GF brains didn't work the same way. They couldn't recreate; they could only steal. Consequently they were all impulse; their identity was just whatever they happened to be feeling at the time; and what a lot of them felt was hungry for memories. For a better identity.

Why else would they help you so much, stick by you, once junctioned to you? If you kept them with you long enough, guided them into learning enough new abilities, they stole away so much of you in order to build themselves that new identity that after a while they almost thought they _were_ you.

They didn't steal memories on purpose. They just came to believe your memories were really _theirs_.

Then had come the tricky part.

"Fine. He's yours. Tell me more about him," Irvine had thought. And had focused right away on his breathing. On the crack in the wall of the changing room in G-Garden's training center. On his fingernails. On the wool socks he'd taken off before drills and stuffed into his formal boots. On the athletic socks and regulation boots on his feet.

On anything but Bexley Kerr. It hadn't been easy. Like telling yourself not to think of pink geezards. You thought of them right away, unless you'd been forewarned, and in that case you tried to think of anything but.

_I…I can't_.

_I don't know anything more_.

He still couldn't think of Bexley, not yet. So Irvine had focused on the showerheads. He'd counted the holes in the nearest showerhead.

"Do…"

The tiles. Irvine sketched out a mental copy of the pattern on the tiles.

"You…"

The uneven wood bench, painted a dull G-Garden brick red. Irvine counted the grains in the wood.

"Want to…"

The pipes beneath the sinks. Irvine followed their loops from the sink to the wall, from the wall to the sink.

"Know…"

The creak of door as another trainee came in and headed for the lockers. Creak, creak, creak. Irvine had replayed it in his mind. GFs could only hit what you were thinking of right then. They couldn't go deeper. Thank Hyne.

"More?"

_Yes_!

So Irvine let it slip. Bexley Kerr, berating him. Bexley Kerr, offhandedly praising him. Bexley Kerr in Deling City, in the Desert, in his office at the D-District, where he oversaw prisoner transport. Bexley, Bexley, Bexley. Bexley explaining that he had only adopted Irvine at the urging of his wife, Aurora Kinneas, and then Aurora (nice, pretty, joyful like Selphie; but Irvine didn't want to think too much about her, because he didn't want to risk losing her) had died in a prisoner riot, and Bexley had discovered Edea Kramer's no takebacks policy.

So they'd been stuck together. Bexley with the kid. Irvine with his (second) dead mom's surname, per Galbadia continent matrilineal custom. This was fine; he didn't want to be named after Bexley anyway.

_I do not wish to be named after him!_

_He hit me once!_

_He-_

_How did you_ do _that?_

"That's a memory," Irvine had said. "Mine. Not yours. But it's delicious, right?"

_Filling_.

_I am someone_.

_I am you_.

_We are_ connected.

And, Hyne damn him if it hadn't been weird, but at that Zona Seeker had sounded almost blissful. Mechanical voice notwithstanding.

"Do you want more?" Irvine had said. "I'm not stingy."

_Yes!_

"Alright. Let's work out a deal, then."

And that had been the start of the bargain. Nice memories? Zona Seeker could peek at them. But no claiming them. No taking them to wherever the hell it happened to store human-like thoughts, out of his reach. It could take the bad or distasteful ones whenever it felt like it, though. It wasn't like it minded. A bad identity was still an identity. And GFs didn't seem to conceive of 'bad' and 'good' the same way normal people did, anyway.

All the same, this was why Irvine figured his first time must not have been particularly good. He couldn't quite remember it. But he could remember telling Bismarck – the second GF he ever junctioned – that little Sefie from the orphanage was off-limits, but this chick? The soldier here? She didn't mean much. It had been an empty experience. Whatever her name was.

Irvine could remember knowing her name, at this point. But he couldn't remember the name itself.

_You have lost things. We make you lose them. This is why I cannot take your memories_, recited Siren, in the present.

Irvine went over this with her every time he junctioned her. Once they left you, the GFs couldn't retain much. They went back to being all impulse. Sometimes they took your lost memories with them, which really worried him, especially since it was a useless endeavor; they couldn't seem to access them once outside the human brain.

"This," Irvine reminded her, "Is why you can't take without asking first. Unless it's bad. Or useless. Pain. One night stands. That kind of thing."

Selphie, verifying their train passes with the station attendant, turned to look at him. She knew by now that he bargained with the GFs in his mind. Irvine could see her making a face at Rinoa about it; she was torn over it. On the one hand, Irvine often took a long long time standing there talking with his GFs, and it seemed to take something out of him. She told him that she'd always just accepted them, hadn't worried about memory loss, and she'd been fine. No bargains needed. It seemed to her like a lot of unnecessary stress that Irvine was throwing on himself.

But on the other hand, Selphie hated not knowing things. She was determined to learn and master his GF-bargaining trick on principle, even if she was doing fine with storing memories in her online diary and even if she could never seem to clear her head the way he could. Teaching her was uphill going. Particularly since every time she asked after the memories he traded away to his GFs, he had to come up with something other than 'recollections of my asshole father' and 'people I have slept with who aren't you.'

_You think you will forget the one night stands anyway_, Siren noted, skimming the surface of his thoughts.

"Well, and also it's good for me not to have them," thought Irvine. "People asking for paternity tests, that kind of thing."

Since he thought of paternity tests, Siren thought of paternity tests, and understood for the first time what they were, and then she sent him a flash of disapproval – she was a very human GF in more ways than her form. She didn't need to get really verbal and specific, so much as project her emotions at you in a judgey way if she damn well felt like it.

"I always submit to the paternity tests! Sometimes I pay for them. And none of them has ever come back positive," Irvine protested.

Irvine was a big believer in just about every form of contraception under the sun. He was a good Garden boy like that.

"Don't take my memories of how to use contraceptives," he warned Siren. "I need those."

_But you did not need the name of your first love_.

"Right," Irvine thought. "What? No. Not a love. Just a woman."

The insinuation that he might have loved someone other than Selphie stunned him; he didn't like it. He actually started, right there in the station, and Rinoa, who was buying magazines from the platform seller, caught sight of this and raised an eyebrow.

_How would you know?_ said Siren smugly. _You traded away your memories of her_.

"That's exactly why she can't be my love," Irvine argued. This was the problem with Siren. No identity didn't mean no personality. And her personality was even worse than Zona Seeker's had been.

_Perhaps it ended poorly, and you removed the wounds she left_.

Oh, now there was a disturbing thought.

_Yes. I think so as well_.

"I don't even know her name," said Irvine.

Only then, suddenly, he did.

_Rill Tremlett_, Siren noted.

It had flashed across his mind very unexpectedly. Because it was on the cover of the magazine Rinoa had bought. She'd bought more than a few. And one, one of the gossip rags that had sprung up in the wake of the war to pollute the old _Timber Maniacs_ market, came with the headline:

**Garden Sharpshooter: Loose and Lurid?  
Former Lover Rill Tremlett Tells All!**

The rest of the cover was a pastiche of photos: a photo of Rill; some blurry pictures of Irvine in FH, "terrorizing the locals"; and a brief caption that noted that he was supposed to be dating Trabia Garden survivor and fellow hero Selphie Tilmitt. **Supposed to be.** But he probably wasn't being faithful, was the insinuation. There was also a photo of a teenage Irvine in the lower left, near the pricing mark. Teenage Irvine was not wearing very much. In small red letters, the magazine promised more inside. But probably not any more _clothes_.

"Fucking Hyne," Irvine said, too stunned to say anything more.

"You should see the ones about me," Rinoa muttered.

Selphie caught up to them by this point. She grabbed the magazines out of Rinoa's hands. She said, furiously, "Trabia Garden Survivor Selphie Tilmitt. Homeless Refugee Selphie Tilmitt. Poor Little Mourning Selphie Tilmitt. Adel's Tits! Why do you buy this stuff?"

"I want to know what they're saying about me," Rinoa said defensively.

Irvine still hadn't found any words.

He was pretty sure he was _thirteen_ in that one picture of him.

Sure, people said stuff, and had been saying stuff about him all his life. But this. This was—this was—

Siren put it better than he could have. _Can I have this memory? The one you're laying the groundwork for right now?_ she said. _I ask only because it doesn't seem to be shaping up to be a good one_.

* * *

Selphie had once loved trains, but now she hated them.

Trains meant traveling incognito. Why? Because suddenly everybody knew who they were, because they'd gone and unthinkingly saved the world, and there were reporters everywhere. In her parents' yard in Trabia. At destroyed Trabia Garden. In Esthar. Everywhere but B-garden, really, since Xu didn't tolerate the press coming onto Garden without an invite and had resorted to creative means to drive them away (dangerous cadet drills near the exits, and "escaped" malboros and stuff).

Irvine and Rinoa said the Ragnarok was conspicuous? Please.

_They_ were conspicuous. Them. Selphie, Irvine, Rinoa, Squall, Quistis, Zell. Wherever they went, people were suddenly interested in knowing everything about them and making it up when they didn't know. Photographers had taken to stalking the Garden cars when it seemed like one of the group might be traveling. This, predictably, interfered with their missions. And had led to Xu practically throwing their week of vacation time in their faces as soon as she could spare them; there were only so many paparazzi invasions the Headmistress could deal with.

Fine. Whatever, as Squall would say. They'd take vacations. They'd make themselves scarce, practically invisible. Rinoa would remove her trademark highlights and chop off half her hair, swap her clothes. Irvine and Selphie would do the same; the latter no longer a byword for flashy desert menswear, instead traveling in a simple cap and black slacks, and the former would wear boring green pants instead of her pretty yellow dress.

And people still squinted at them on the station platform like they could figure out who they were. And pestered them like they were entitled to know everything about them. Honestly, why had they bothered saving the world anyway? Now the world wouldn't leave them alone. The world _sucked_.

As if to punctuate this, the train shuttered into the station rather pitifully, seeming pathetic after Esthar's superior airship technology. Selphie shoved the magazines under her arm wrathfully, and said, "Let's board. You can look at these once we're in our car."

She strode off, practically tossing their tickets at the conductor. Rinoa and Irvine dutifully followed.

"Can I—" Irvine said, as soon as they were inside. He seemed flustered. "Can I—um. One of those. I need to see it."

"I wish they would stop writing about your ex-girlfriends," Selphie told him, a little ruthlessly. She sorted through the magazines for whichever one had his name. "I like to pretend you never ever had any other lovers. Ever." She itched to blow something up. Truth was – when you were furious, nothing blew off steam better than the Ragnarok's high-octane flight and ability to withstand explosions. Their journey fighting Ultimecia had taught her that. But all around them there was nothing to blow up. Nothing but train, and you couldn't blow up a train when you were riding on it. "I mean, I know you did have lovers. But I'm more jealous and spiteful than I ever thought I was. And when I think about them I want to kill them. So, you know. Pretend."

Ah. There it was. Another jilted ex for Irvine. Another sleazy headline. Another—wait.

Oh, Hyne. _Irvy_.

"How old are you in this picture?" Selphie said.

"Young," Irvine said uncomfortably.

Selphie handed the magazine over. Rinoa caught sight of it as she did so.

"I'm sorry," she said quickly. "I didn't notice that picture when I— I mean. The first article really upset me. These do too. But I just buy them all now, as a matter of habit, almost, so—"

"It's fine," Irvine said quickly. "It's not like you printed the thing."

But someone had. Someone had seen quick cash in it and gone right ahead. And someone – something Tremlett, from what Selphie could read from here; Irvine was scanning the article anxiously and had part of the headline blocked off with his hand – had taken the picture in the first place, and then delivered it to the papers.

Something Tremlett was a dead woman.

Selphie was going to hunt her down and blow her up. Lots of times. In small pieces. After she cut off the pieces. After she beat her black and blue.

"Can I see it when you're done?" she asked Irvine. "Not – not if you're not comfortable."

He brought the magazine down and looked at her for a good few seconds. She couldn't read his expression; that was one of the things she liked least about him. She could never really read Irvy's expression. Not anymore, anyway. Not since he was, like, five. Selphie vaguely remembered him being a lot more open at age five.

"Sure," he said eventually. "Let me finish first, though."

Then the magazine went back up, blocking his face. While she waited for him to finish, Selphie arranged the others on the floor. Just to get a good look at them all: the full picture. Then she could plan. They had to do something about their level of media exposure. They'd been ignoring it, hoping it would blow over. She'd been ignoring it. A longtime fan of gossip news for years, Selphie had found herself suddenly retreating, uncomfortable, from the world's magazines and newspapers for the past seven months. Firstly because it was weird to see herself listed there alongside the Card Queen and other genuine media personalities. And secondly because she hadn't seen any reason to keep tabs on this stuff; she herself hadn't even been a major target until recently, not like Squall or Rinoa.

For a few reasons. 1) Selphie was friends with most people; most people didn't have anything really bad to say about her. 2) Selphie was largely considered the member of the group with the saddest backstory, a genuine Trabia Garden survivor, entitled to moments of private mourning (the assumption was that she was always mourning; the public didn't like to think of her not mourning; that would have been tasteless of her). And 3) Selphie was actually, once you got your hands on video footage of her limit breaks, downright _terrifying_.

But then the foundations of the new Trabia Garden were unveiled. And suddenly, quite without warning, the papers had decided they needed to revive their mourning heroine.

**Selphie Smiles (Through Her Tears?)  
"Tilmitt Has Already Moved On!" Says Trabia Refugee, Of Callous Classmate  
Tilmitt Seeks Solace From Tragedy In Arms Of Garden Womanizer  
"Our Selphie Will Never Heal The Hole In Her Heart," Say Trabia Friends**

Selphie had always been a big believer in the freedom of the press. She collected _Timber Maniacs_, after all. She had several blog posts up about the revolutionary role the paper had played in shaping the politics of the Galbadian continent. She didn't hate free speech, not really.

She just hated that her grief – and her boyfriend, apparently – were now public property.

Rinoa had it even worse. Half of the world despised her on principle: she was a sorceress. Of the other half, Galbadia despised her because she was an open supporter of Timber independence; and Timber hated her because it had come out that she'd been raised on General Caraway's dime. Winhill had suddenly taken a proprietary interest in Squall. So they hated her because she was, according to the _Deling City Mirror_, not nearly good enough for him. And Dollet's gays and lesbians rather liked her: sorceresses, as social outcasts, had long been cultural icons for some of that set. And Rinoa had always shown them support anyway. But, judging by the letters to the editor published in the _Dollet Daily Press_ after their **Heartilly: Doomed to Become Ultimecia?** article, absolutely everyone else in Dollet felt it was irresponsible of Garden not to kill her where she stood.

In light of all this, it was slightly understandable that she'd started to collect all the print media she could lay her hands on. It gave her some inkling of where the next death threats were going to roll in from.

Squall had it nearly as bad. Sure, some of the world still looked at him as a hero. But the truth was: he didn't have what it took to be a media darling. He just didn't. Squall's personality was 85% rude silence, 13% cutting remarks, 2% unthinkingly throwing over everything else in his life for his girlfriend. And the world was starting to catch on. Timber, which was grudgingly in favor of him because Galbadia hated him, was starting to put out articles like: **Does Leonhart Hinder the Cause of Timber Independence?** Squall was only tangentially connected to Timber independence; he was the Garden muscle that happened to be dating its driving force. But that was more than nothing. And they had a point. He had a tendency to piss off Galbadian diplomats over nothing. He had a wry rejoinder for every oblique insult, and dished up stubborn silence when it came time to negotiate. Squall was a terrific Commander. But not a very good politician.

The rest of the Galbadia continent feared that he'd team up with Laguna to conquer them. Some reporter had discovered the connection between Squall and Laguna three months ago, and now no one would stop talking about it. Except, of course, Squall. Squall wouldn't go near Esthar if you offered him a million gil. Xu had actually done this by attempting to assign him many a mission there, only to have rank pulled on her and the missions flatly denied.

For their part, the Esthar populace were beginning to suspect that Squall would be making overtures at Galbadia in an attempt to conquer _them_. Esthar had very free press laws. So the _Esthar Independent_, with no one from Laguna's office moving to stop them, had published a hugely popular op-ed arguing that Squall might any day now wrench the Estharian presidency away from his father. The thrust of it seemed to be that Squall wanted retaliation for all those years Laguna had been a deadbeat dad. The _Independent_ intimated that Laguna had maybe abandoned his son deliberately (which was untrue. Sir Laguna would _never_), and probably deserved it. But ultimately the paper had concluded that the father would be a better president than the son. Laguna was cheery and approachable. Squall was grim and threatening.

Irvine, of course, had all those newspaper articles on his sexual dalliances. When he handed the latest over so that Selphie could add it to her pile, she got to check that – yes – they still believed him to be currently sleeping his way across the Esthar continent. Still likely possessed of every sexual disease under the sun. Almost certainly in your backyard, about to seduce your son and daughter. To read it, Irvine was a worldwide menace, a sexual threat putting the world on high alert, and besides this, like the rest of them, he seemed arrogant, too aware of his role as a world hero. And he'd made no friends at G-Garden, which was suspicious and pointed to severe deficiencies in his character. His own father, claimed the paper, was reputed to dislike him.

Quistis's parents, by contrast, had informed the _Fisherman's Horizon Gazette_ that they were very proud of her. They'd also had their pictures taken in the _Dollet Inquirer_, and had won a lucrative contract with the now-functioning Dollet radio tower to talk about her every Sunday from three to four. They chided her publicly for her clothing choices and failure to send home enough of her paycheck, described in detail her extreme beauty and sad, sad luck with men, generally waxed rhapsodic about their close family connection to her; and despaired that perhaps she was making the wrong friends. They didn't seem to approve of the rest of the group: all rude people and loose men and sorceresses. This was probably why Quistis never, ever, ever mentioned them to her friends or coworkers; and in fact lived life as though her parents did not exist.

Which did not stop them from snagging the cover of this week's _Timber Times_: **"My Beautiful Daughter Needs A Man!" Cries Mrs. Trepe. "Sometimes I Worry That She's Frigid!"**

Of all of them, only Zell had really escaped the media blitz. Balamb had run a local interest piece on him right after the war. But Balamb was an unpretentious town; it had just been a brief note underneath his picture at some long-ago birthday party, approximately age eight. It had been squished onto on page three of the weekly broadsheet. **Our Zell Dincht Of Main Street Who Helped Save The World Last Week; Good For Him! Mother Is Proud**. And the _Trabia Chronicle_ had listed him as one of the B-Garden alums who'd dropped by to support the rebuilding a few months ago. But aside from that, the papers seemed to think he was a nice Balamb boy, enormously boring, not particularly threatening, with no great tragedies in his past, unlikely to snap and kill his biological parents in a bloody coup; and, worst of all, not even dating anyone. One of the smaller news sources out in Dollet had run an article on him and the Library Girl last week. Zell's mother had written them a strongly worded note as soon as the edition hit the streets, they'd published it and apologized, and the whole thing seemed to have died down. Zell hadn't even had to change his appearance much. People genuinely had no idea he was _that_ Zell Dincht, even with Zell Dincht being an extremely rare name.

Zell didn't make a single showing in anything Rinoa had collected from the newsstands.

How did he do it?

"Zell's looking good this week," Irvine said, looking at the spread on the floor. "I'm almost jealous."

Irvine didn't look shaken, but he must have been. He had to be.

"The perks of being well-adjusted and boring," Selphie told him, trying to cheer him up. "I wouldn't take it personally."

"Zell's just a very good person," Rinoa said. She patted Angelo distractedly – Angelo always traveled with her. People didn't like telling her she couldn't take her dog on trains because she was a sorceress and sorceresses tended to be terrifying, so here the dog was. Rinoa added, "If we're going to gossip about him, I'd prefer that we be kind about it." But then she crouched down to get a better look and saw that a publication in Trabia, of all places, was declaring her **The Terror of Timber**. So she added, "It must be nice for him to not be a sorceress, though."

"He's also not as good looking as you," Selphie told Irvine.

"Probably really wonderful for him to have parents who are completely un-military and have never once tried to take over other countries," said Rinoa.

"And his friends are all alive," Selphie said.

"And you'd think people would make more noise about him, because everyone knows him," said Irvine.

"That is so annoying," said Selphie, hypocritically getting into the swing of things. "I hate people like that."

"No one ever forgets about him," Irvine said. "It's like: oh, there's Zell. Can't miss Zell."

"Hometown boy, Zell," said Selphie, "Totally Still Has An Intact Hometown Zell."

"Has A Living Mother Who Loves Him Zell," said Rinoa.

"Team player, Zell!" said Irvine. "No Trouble Relating To People, Zell!"

"That's wasted on him," Rinoa pointed out, "Because he never uses his social ability for political good. I mean, you don't see him liberating Balamb—"

Fun as the rag-on-Zell session was, here Selphie felt she had to be objective.

"In his defense, only like one person's ever ever tried to take over Balamb. Because all you'd gain would be SeeDs for neighbors, some pet Fastitocalons, and a lot of fish. It would be more of a headache to control than Timber, and is less strategically beneficial than FH."

"Still!" Rinoa said, tracing **Terror of Timber** with one pale blue nail. "They invited him to be on the Balamb Municipal Committee! To be a force for change! And do you know what he said?"

"'No, thanks. Cuts in on my T-boarding time,'" Irvine said.

"Zell!" Rinoa finished glumly.

There was silence for a minute. The silence meant they had time for a little bit of guilt to sneak into their minds.

"Okay, he probably didn't deserve that," Rinoa said. She got up and sat back in her seat, looking sheepish.

"Yeah. It just felt nice," said Selphie.

"Still," said Irvine, "Now that we've gotten the Seifer Almasy out…"

That did more to make them all feel guilty than the silence ever had. Because Zell _was_ a very good person. And well-adjusted. And beloved by his parents. Just a lucky guy all around, really. And it was only deeply troubled, arrogant assholes that picked on him; everybody knew that. Deeply troubled, arrogant assholes who somehow escaped completely the consequences of their actions. And who, after a few headlines spotting them fishing in FH and a few op-eds calling for their death, had faded from the newspapers completely.

"Now there's a disappearing act," Selphie muttered.

"Now there's cosmic _unfairness_," said Rinoa. "If anybody should be called a Terror of Anything—"

"Everything, actually," said Irvine. "I mean, he had his good qualities as a kid, but Terror of Everything is a more accurate way of getting the—" Here he waved offhandedly at some spectral Seifer Almasy sitting in the corner of the train car, no doubt smirking at them and thrilled to be the topic of conversation and the star of all their resentful nightmares, "General personality across."

He was also, randomly, Rinoa's ex-boyfriend. Kinda. More or less. After losing touch with her, he'd gone completely crazy, betrayed the Garden that had raised him, and tried to feed her to the evil sorceress Adel. This explained the vitriol in Rinoa's voice when she next spoke.

"I hate it. It's so unjust. He vanishes, and deals with none of the fallout. And we deal with all of it! I don't want to talk about him," Rinoa said. She stood very suddenly and seemed to make up her mind about something. She picked up the magazines and very deliberately crumpled them into small balls, one by one. "Do. Not. Want. To. Let's just not. Let's go back to Zell. Zell is nice. The world is a better place for having lots of Zells. And few Seifer Almasys."

She lined the crumpled magazine balls up on the seat next to her; incidentally right in the place Irvine had waved at. Then she very methodically pointed a finger at each one in turn. And, in turn, each one exploded into blue flames.

Selphie looked at Irvine. Irvine looked at Selphie. Angelo looked at both of them, then whined and covered her face with a paw.

"Alright, Rinoa, whatever you want," Irvine said carefully.

Seifer Almasy was probably better saved for Rinoa's therapy sessions anyway.

At least, Selphie hoped Rinoa was getting therapy. Selphie was. Doctor K, three times a week. But they all needed it. All of them. Not a single psychologically sound one in the group. Not even Zell, probably, when you factored in the years of bullying and the snide commentary he still had to suffer through from even his own friends. F-minuses on the psych evals all around.

"We have so many problems," Selphie muttered.

Irvine looked at her assessingly. Selphie still couldn't tell what he was thinking. "Sure you're not buying into the bad press?" he said.

But she wasn't, not really. They _did_ have problems, every single one of them. Only, now that they were heroes, those problems became magnified. And were broadcast to the world.

* * *

"You can keep a low profile when you get to Dollet, right?" said Cid. "I know your connections there are…not very low-profile, but—"

His patient coughed, but there was less blood in it than there had been before. This comforted Cid.

"Anyway, like I said, I'll distract the kids," Cid said. "You stay here. Get ready. I'll throw them off. Then we'll get you to Dollet."

Raijin floated in and out of his own head.

He wasn't sure what they had done to him. Some kind of liquid magic. Some injection. And it meant there were parts of him that weren't a part of him anymore. They were visiting strange places, horrible places: a great castle, a factory where exhausted men and women were worked on great machines, the laboratories of the city of Esthar.

Someone called him back. He wished it was Fujin, but it was not Fujin; it was a girl with gold in her eyes and silver paint on her dark skin. A sorceress.

Raijin screamed.

* * *

Reo Wenwist = Owen Wister. There are a couple more instances sprinkled throughout of me playing with anagrams, which is a thing I've stolen from Walter Moers. Walter Moers is the inspiration for whole chunks of this story, actually.


	5. Chapter 5

March 18th. Centra.

They planned to see Cid at sunrise. Just to keep him on his toes and remind him that these were SeeDs he'd raised, not children he could dismiss on a whim. But then he showed up a minute before they finished packing up camp and heading out of the orphanage. Looking only slightly apologetic. And so familiar. And so fatherly.

And in any case his eternal unreliability was just so _Cid_ of him.

Quistis saw him first, and good thing too, because who knew whether Squall and Zell would be able to keep their heads about it.

"That wasn't very nice, Cid," she told him warningly. "Squall was so excited to see you."

Cid stared at her.

"Well," she relented, "As excited as Squall gets."

Cid nodded pensively.

"I picked the right person for Commander," he said, after a moment.

Quistis bit her tongue. He'd picked the _only_ person for Commander. It wasn't so much that he liked Squall – she'd had to defend Squall to him more than once while acting as Squall's instructor – it was more that Squall had been trapped in time compression. He'd shown up years ago to cue in Cid's wife about the possibility of malevolent future sorceresses, and so sometime in the past decade or so Cid had come around to the idea that Squall was destined to be Garden's next true leader.

"Look at you, all in purple," Cid said, jumping to a new topic with no rational explanation for why.

Cid did this often. He was disarming like that. You had to be very secure in yourself and not easily thrown off to deal successfully with him, which was why people like Xu and Squall made good administrative foils for Cid. Quistis, not so much. She'd passed her SeeD test and made the youngest instructor in the history of Garden, and then spent endless faculty meetings feeling off-balance as Cid danced around practically every point he really wanted to make.

She usually nodded along like she had no problem with this. She was too much of a people-pleaser (which in her mind she termed professionalism, but really it was people-pleasing: a need to be liked) to head Cid off and force him to talk straight. It wasn't in her character.

"This Dollet radio show said my old outfit looked like bondage gear," she told Cid.

"That's not very nice," Cid said. "I always thought you seemed so confident. And also you made me feel nervous, like I might need to beat up people who got very fresh."

"The point was more to show that _I_ could beat up people who got very fresh," said Quistis. "And to dare them to get fresh, so I could prove it."

It had been, too.

If Quistis was going to go through life insecure and off-balance, then at least she could use that. She could figure out how to turn it on others. At some point, probably while her not-parents harangued her for some imperfect score on something, she'd begun to understand that her feelings of insecurity made no sense; she really _was_ good enough. Intellectually, she knew she was. She was attractive, fast, strong, smart – everything people were supposed to be, really. Only just below the intellectual level, somewhere in the dark and chaotic id, she could never quite convince herself of it. So she faked it. All the better to disarm people. She had to have picked something up from Cid, after all. He _was_ her very first father figure.

"See? So confident. I knew I picked the right person for Instructor," Cid said.

Picked and subsequently fired. But hey, why quibble?

Actually, Quistis sort of wanted to quibble. She wanted to make him feel as uncomfortable as she felt. In the past seven months, she'd been trying something new. It was: Stop Beating Yourself Up And Do Whatever You Want. Selphie had cued her into it. Selphie was like a little sister to Quistis, and therefore the teaching should have run in the other direction. But she was also Quistis's psychological opposite, all unbridled confidence and a complete lack of apology for anything, and as a result Selphie's life always seemed so refreshing. So perfect. Selphie had probably never had a crush on Squall Leonhart; Selphie was too together to romanticize people like that. Selphie had probably never hung out with people who bored her; Selphie had her pick of friends, and few overly-aggressive groupies.

And Selphie would have told Cid to shove it where the sun didn't shine.

Selphie would have made Cid as off-balance as he made her.

Almost without thinking, almost for no reason at all, just as an impulse, it slipped out: "What are you hiding about the Kashkabald, Cid?"

Cid, who'd been clearly about to brush right past her and head into the orphanage, stopped short.

"It must be bothering you if you're being that direct about it," he said. "That's not like you."

In for a gil, in for a full-blown weapons upgrade.

"Answer the question."

Cid sighed. He brought his hand to the bridge of his nose and pinched it.

"You…have to see it," he confessed. "I thought they would send some junior SeeDs, actually. This would go more smoothly with junior SeeDs. You're all so high profile now. Magazine covers and radio shows—"

"That's irrelevant—" And also she didn't particularly want to talk about the details there. "We're here now. If you're trying to get us to go back to Garden to demand Xu put new people on it; we can't. Pulling strings like that is hardly in line with Garden procedure or principles. You devised the system; you know this isn't how this works. So stop jumping around and just tell me."

Cid brought a hand to the back of his neck, uneasy.

"Aaah, tell you what?" he said. "I'll meet you there. The Egabi Crater. Four hundred meters due west from the southernmost reach of Almaj into the desert. Oh-seven-hundred."

Quistis raised an eyebrow. Why couldn't he just _say_ it? And, besides that – "It's not going to take us an hour and a half to get there!"

"Edea's in Trabia," Cid said, apropos of nothing. "She thinks she owes them for—well. You know. I should check in with her before I do anything today."

Then he was off, surprisingly fast for a man of his age (a kind of eternal middle age; he'd seemed middle aged for as long as Quistis had known him; even those memories she could pull from her GFs revealed him as rounding about the midsection and graying fast at the temples). Whenever Cid wanted to vanish, vanish he did.

Someone behind her cleared their throat. Quistis whirled around. Squall. He didn't say anything – he usually didn't. The throat clearing was clearly just to alert her to the fact that he'd been there, watching.

So now she felt embarrassed. She couldn't help herself. In the moment, facing down Cid, she'd felt wonderfully liberated. No longer Garden's top good girl, professional to the core, taking orders like a champ, dishing orders as expected. But someone who could think and push and challenge: a glorious rebel. It had felt _good_. She'd never suspected that jumping outside your role, disregarding the questions you were supposed to be asking instead of the ones that you wanted to ask, could feel so good. Sometimes Quistis got snappy with people, edged around and toyed with the idea of disrespecting them, just to jump outside herself for a minute, just to show that she was more than her fame and her role. But that was more for show than anything else, like her old mission gear. It was false confidence. And she only ever exercised it on people she knew she could get away with snapping at: people who wouldn't mind, or else people who were rebellious and egotistical and overconfident themselves and wouldn't notice.

Never at the Headmaster.

It wasn't good SeeD behavior. Under Squall's gaze, she understood this. And felt ashamed. She felt ashamed a lot, actually; often for no particular reason, for failing to completely understand where some cadet was coming from, for being scrutinized by the Trepies all the time, for thinking she could fool the world into believing her to be a competent and confident young woman. That moment with Cid had been a nice vacation from all that shame. But it was over now.

It made no sense that Squall was always a trigger for this shame. Squall was, and had always been, fairly unrepentant himself. But she'd always been fond of him. She tried to unravel all her memories of him now, but it was hard going, because the Brothers and Diablos both were in her brain. Still, she caught a few threads. She knew that once she'd been jealous of the attention he gave Ellone. She knew that she'd wanted to be Ellone, almost. Older and poised and in charge. And Squall represented what you could have if you were like that. The complete and total adoration and attention of someone like him, someone who barely gave anyone the time of day otherwise.

You could be special.

Quistis had people telling her she was special all the time. But the truth was? She'd never really felt it, not a day in her life, not for as long as she could remember. And sure, her memory was patchy. But deep in her bones, she suspected and feared that if she could go back and pull every memory out of every GF that had ever taken one from her, she still wouldn't find a single one in which she'd been really happy with herself.

Zell came up behind Squall at this point. He sort of squinted at the two of them – they were, after all, standing here in silence, gathering up the dust Cid had kicked off when he'd run back to his house.

"We should—" he began.

"We're going to the Kashkabald," Squall said shortly. "Cid is going to meet us there at oh-seven-hundred. We'll take some time to look around before he catches up. He seems like he's hiding something."

"Sure, what else is new?" Zell complained. He ducked back inside to gather up their supplies.

The wave of shame came on stronger. She'd done the wrong thing. They could have interrogated Cid together, the three of them. Or they could have gotten the mission details from him cut-and-dry, pulled them out of him easily with Squall's direct manner and magic touch, and discovered nothing odd was going on. They could have done _anything_ but what she'd done, which was clearly the wrong thing to have done, because she'd been the one to do it. And she never knew what she was doing. Not really.

"Good work," Squall said. He turned and went in after Zell. Elaborating on the point wasn't really his style.

But the compliment didn't make her feel any better. She'd focused in on him, more than once, as some kind of barometer to measure herself by, or else as her panacea, the one person whose attention could cure her of her own insecurity. But when he offered her any attention, it hit her like a wave breaking on the shore, receding right away and leaving only the smallest particles of comfort behind.

She carried her insecurity with her. She wished it were like a memory, that she could shove it at some GF and be done with it. But it was in her bone-deep, more than any single instance or recollection: just the sum of her by now.

* * *

The healer was named Farica Mossgrove. She was a sorceress. Her patient did not trust her. This caused her no small amount of consternation. Her experiences with sorcery were very unlike Rinoa Heartilly's and she was not used to people mistrusting her. Then again, she was not nearly as powerful as Heartilly.

Also, she was only fifteen.

She had an older sister who would come by to snipe as she worked on Raijin.

"There's no real justice in this place," said her sister.

Farica looked at her with resigned golden eyes. She'd been made sorceress very young, so cosmic injustice was a thing she well understood. She said, mildly, "Don't let anyone hear you saying that."

Raijin was a very big young man, but he gave her no trouble due to his size, because restraining him with magic was as easily as breathing. The trouble came in the fact that they'd been messing about with magic of the most destructive kind, magic of the mind. And so she could see very clearly that sometimes Raijin was not in his body at all, but in other places, and in those moments he was very, very lucky that her magic, while not especially great, did have some highly specialized uses. Namely, retrieval.

Some girls could send minds whirling into different spheres, different bodies, different time zones, even.

Farica could not do that. She was not that skilled. She could only bring them back.

The problem was that every time she tried, she gave Raijin a terrible fright. She was, like most sorceresses, not exactly inconspicuous. Her riotous curls contained enough elaborate headpieces to outfit ten sorceresses and her red dress was perhaps more suited to a sorceress ten years older.

"Plus, they took his sister, and the other one," remarked her sister, Renata.

Renata was useless by most people's standards, because she lacked completely any propensity for magic. This was fairly rare. Where Raijin came from, an odd place, half-dream, maybe, that he had a tendency to begin babbling about at odd moments (though never dropping anything useful), people liked to believe that the sorceress power was a rare curse.

But Farica's people had always celebrated it as a rather common blessing. And as she did not have it, Renata had grown up slightly odd, very rebellious, nowhere near as calm and genteel as her young sister.

"Not the other one. The Knight," Farica told her gently.

To be a Knight was no small thing, even a failed Knight. And in fact most Knights were failed Knights. Iseult Neve, Wrolf Gunner, Jana Ki, Undine Meri. All had failed. But this did not mean one should not respect them; they'd been sorceress-touched, elevated. One had to acknowledge that.

And Seifer Almasy was a bit more special than all those others. He was tall. He had a wide mouth, a knightly jaw, golden hair. And even without all that, he'd been sorceress-touched by the greatest sorceress in all the world. One who, temporarily, had completely obliterated the rules of time. No other had ever come so close. Only Ultimecia.

"His name's Seifer," Renata said, rolling her eyes. "Not that it matters much at this point, after what they did to him."

As if in response, Raijin shifted violently on his cot. Farica gave her sister a warning glance.

Renata was opposed to the status quo. She had sympathy for every wretched prisoner, devoured incendiary literature, took on herself the perspective of the criminal, to better understand him. But she, like most people, could not follow through. She only decried what had been done to Seifer Almasy in private. She burned the incendiary literature as soon as she'd read it. And she performed her job as prisoners' warden as instructed, for all that she claimed she wanted to free her charges. And so, even if Farica had agreed with her on every point, she still would have found her sister to be only a would-be revolutionary, worthy of contempt.

Sister. There might be the key. If she could have the sister waiting here, their prisoner might be glad to see her, and so he might tempted to stay in his own head.

"The girl they brought in with him?" Farica said.

Renata rolled her eyes, reached into her pocket, lit a cigarette (which she _knew_ Farica hated). Then she said, "His sister, Fujin."

"Didn't look like him," Farica put in, wanting to be sure Renata had her facts right.

"He called her his sister when he was being tortured," Renata said.

"Interrogated."

"_Tortured_," said Renata. "He said, 'My sister!' It was pretty clear. Maybe she was his half-sister or something. Fuck Hyne if I know."

She said that last bit in a lower voice. It was wrong to wish ill on Hyne and she knew it. Farica wrinkled her nose in disgust and disappointment to hear her say it.

"The girl's dead," Renata said, blowing smoke in her face. "Gone. Bye bye, sister."

Farica stared at her. There went her plan! And the sister had seemed strong, too. And had someone informed the Gallery? Would _she_ have to inform the Gallery? That didn't seem fair. Just because someone had gone and worked a criminal to death.

"Then what am I supposed to do?" Farica said, miserably. "I can't very well tell this one that. He won't come back at all if he finds out his sister's dead. And if he doesn't come back, then—"

"Well, then maybe someone shouldn't have shot his veins clear through with that noxious toxin," Renata said, with faux-agreeability.

Farica was extremely tempted to hit her with an offensive spell, only she wasn't particularly good at offensive spells, so she didn't bother. She just buried her head in her hands.

"Well, I'd say to bring in his friend…" Renata began.

Farica hit her. It was very sudden; Renata had not been expecting it. Also, since Farica had very long nails, it hurt. Renata grimaced and put a hand to the spot on her arm that now boasted three scratches, long and red, as though inflicted by a very vicious cat.

"You know I can't bring Sir Almasy in!" Farica said.

"Of course you can't. He's not here anymore," Renata told her.

This, Farica felt, was a dig at her. Even though it wasn't, not really. It was a dig at everyone in their lives, and Farica was only collateral damage. Renata had no way of knowing that Farica had found Seifer Almasy exciting, bold, had liked the flash in his eyes. Now that all this had vanished, she was somewhat saddened. A little girl deprived of a crush.

"He probably won't settle back in his head because you have no Hyne-damned bedside manner," Renata said. "Tell you what? When I come off patrol, I'll sit with this prisoner you have. Coax him back into his head. 'Course, they'll only torture him again."

"Yes, but they won't punish _me_," Farica said.

"Fair enough," Renata said easily.

* * *

Garden transports were fast. They were designed to be inconspicuous and quick, to strike like lightning. So they made it to the Southern shores near the Kashkabald with time to spare, and in fact with their hour and a half, they could have jumped across the world to Deling City and still been back in time to meet Cid.

"He's given us no info," Zell said. "Do these sinkholes open up under you without warning? I'd like to know if I'm gonna be swallowed up by the desert. Ma's heart would break."

"You were time compressed and you survived," Quistis said wryly. "He says it's the Egabi crater."

They ought to circle the thing first, though, Squall thought. Because Zell had a point. They were working with very little concrete information. Standard Cid, really.

"Keep your eyes peeled for anything out of place," Squall told them. "We approach from the South, then circle the crater from at least five meters out. Judging from the reports on the topography, that should give us visibility of most of the crater floor. Close in as necessary, but with extreme caution. You both head along the West. I'll take the East. We'll cover it more quickly that way, and meet to discuss on the other side."

They saluted. They looked worried. Quistis looked the more worried of the two, but she was too professional to say anything. Zell said, "Squall, I don't know that we should split up. Cid's being even weirder than normal about this, and—"

In response, Squall swung a leg over one of the motorbikes they'd pulled off the transport sub, pulled on his helmet, and started the engine. He rode off.

He didn't feel like discussing his orders. There was no real divide between friend and junior ranking officer with Zell. So Squall had to introduce a divide for the sake of missions. This, he privately felt, was a favor he performed for Zell's benefit as much as his own.

He was, in his own small and quiet way, pleased to have acquired a friend. Four friends. And a girlfriend. They were high-maintenance creatures, more finicky and less docile than GFs, prone to irrationalities, and often completely unaware that in a non-working day Squall required at least three hours by himself, away from their constant havoc, or else they simply tired him out.

And in a working day, they could expect to see him not as a friend at all. Simply as Commander.

He surveyed the crater from where he'd stopped. It was wide and deep. The loose sand sloped down gently for about thirty five meters. Then it gave way to reddish rock that steeply jutted down to the floor of the thing, which continued on for some time. The opposite side was not visible from here. There were no sinkholes that he could detect. There were a few far-off cactuars dotting the chasm floor.

Squall nudged Shiva out of his brain and had her float to the edge to get a better look. She couldn't retain much of the information for very long, but any brief snapshot she could give him was better than nothing. It took careful prodding. He had junctioned her for so long that she believed, by now, that she and Squall were one and the same. He liked the easy loyalty that gave him, and the connectivity with her; he didn't want to disavow her of the notion. So he had held off on using Irvine's bargaining techniques. Those did more than let you keep what you wanted. They reminded even long-junctioned GFs that you were something different from them and that was unpleasant. Then you felt you had an intruder in your head.

Squall held onto his memories through sheer mental willpower, the same boost the rest of them had used seven months ago, in Trabia, to recover some fragments of their time at the orphanage. You just needed a few neurons to fire, a small reminder that memories had once been there. And you had to accept that this was an imperfect system. Sometimes the memories of the memories got taken as well. Sometimes, as soon as you reminded yourself that they were there, you lost anything connected to them that you _had_ happened to retain.

But the only surefire alternative was not junctioning. And that was no alternative at all. It rendered one powerless. And it was cowardly, besides. Most people didn't lose everything. 99% survived the junctioning experience with enough memories to not even realize they'd been changed by it. Irvine was just paranoid and hyper-cautious. Squall, for his part, didn't mind a little risk.

Shiva floated back, tethered to him by her earthly Manifest, the ice fragment stud Squall usually kept in his left ear. It was like returning home for her. She was buzzing with mental images, but they faded quickly. Squall caught nothing odder than what he was seeing himself at this distance. He started up the bike again. He needed a different angle of the crater floor.

They would have to tackle this themselves, whatever this was. Cid wouldn't be much help. Cid rarely was. Squall didn't disrespect him, not really. It would have been hypocritical to disrespect the only man to ever give him a home. But at Garden Cid had always been peculiarly disconnected from him, not emotionally invested, even as he remained hands-on about Squall's gunblade training, determined to teach him every angle of the assigned syllabus and more.

It had been strangely alienating.

Though at the time Squall had been so used to the treatment that he wouldn't have described it that way. And it made sense now. Cid had expected to have to send Squall off to fight Ultimecia in the future; to perhaps have Squall lost in time compression, jumping from place to place, forever. And so he'd prepared Squall as best he could, while emotionally shielding himself from any grief or remorse that might result if Garden's own sacrificial lamb didn't survive the role Cid had carved out for him.

It was how Squall himself would have approached it, really.

_That's horrible!_

Squall stopped the bike. Shiva. He was very aware just then that this came from her, and she sent him a little frisson of confusion, because as far as she was concerned, what came from her came from him. She was even more linked to him than Rinoa was. But she couldn't think the way he could. She had no memories to ground her thoughts in. Right? So maybe, maybe…the thought had come from him. From somewhere deep inside him. She'd just fixated on it.

Because that was what he did think, deep down. He did think it was horrible, the way Cid had used him and the others. Horrible but necessary.

But pushing Squall away, keeping him at a distance…? That hadn't been necessary. Squall had faced up to this in his own life, after all. How holding others at arms length could be nothing more than cowardice, nothing more than the fear that they might leave. Instead of taking a chance on them, instead of holding out to show them that he was a person, that he shouldn't be left behind – he simply told himself it didn't hurt. He wasn't connected to them in any way, so who cared if they left? It didn't matter.

But to discover that Cid might have been thought of _him_ the same way?

That hurt.

Because he'd always trusted Cid. Always. Cid featured in the memories that he fought hardest to keep. Cid and himself and Seifer; ages thirty-something and five and six. Training. Cid and himself and Seifer; ages nearly-forty and eleven and twelve. Training some more. Cid handing him the standard psychological evaluation for junior cadets, saying, "Now, Squall, I suspect you won't pass, but we'll work it out between us, you and I." And then small, inexplicable burst of hope that even Squall hadn't understood. Like maybe Cid meant he'd help, really help. He'd stand by Squall. He'd be… something like a father.

Then a note in Cid's hand a week later, when Squall had stopped into the infirmary for some minor scrape. Taped to the first paper on the stack of evaluations: _Disregard the grade. Pass this student_. It had been Squall's paper. That was how Cid worked things out.

A few months ago, after the news about Squall's biological father had surfaced, Cid had called in to Xu via vidscreen and caught sight of the boy he'd appointed Commander.

"Squall! You cut your hair! You look nothing like your picture in all the papers now," he'd said. Then dismissively turned away.

That was it. That was all Squall had heard of him in the past seven months.

Cid had never let himself really like Squall once he'd learned what Squall's role was to be, never really offered Squall any kind of human connection. And, somewhere deep inside, it made Squall furious. When Cid made stupid observations, Squall saluted perfectly and kept his mouth shut, because that was what Squall _did_, ninety-five percent of the time. But Squall should have put down him cruelly: for shutting off any feeling he'd ever had for Squall and the rest of the orphanage gang, for keeping secrets from the children in his care, for shoving these missions and this life on them. The papers said it was Fate that had brought Squall to this point in his life, and maybe it was. But sometimes Squall wondered if 'Fate' came with the last name 'Kramer.'

But Squall never did talk back to Cid, or even tolerate much rebellious talk about the man. It would have stirred up exactly all these thoughts: painful thoughts. And it was second nature to him at this point to hold his cruel conclusions and painful thoughts in. To hold every thought in. The problem was, more and more he'd begun to feel a strange new sense of discomfort in doing this. Because he wanted to say what he felt. He did.

Before making friends with Rinoa and the rest of them, it hadn't mattered. He'd been the only possible judge of his words and thoughts and actions – the only being in the universe that counted. Maybe Seifer had come close. But not as an independent person, not really. More as a reflection of himself, the boy who verbalized everything Squall wanted to say and then some, a strange extension of Squall; nothing more. And then Seifer had died and come back to life, and everything had changed. Squall had met new people – Rinoa, who plunged right into desert prisons to rescue people she hardly knew; and Irvine, who seemed like a cowardly creep until you got to know him; and even Laguna, who Squall couldn't escape from, not really, not any more than he could escape from any of the difficult realities in his life.

Also, he'd seen his whole home smashed apart. It gave him some perspective.

Suddenly, he'd realized that there were a lot more people out there, living independent and whole and separate from him, and that letting them see all of him wasn't a bad thing. Even them _judging_ him wasn't a bad thing, because they were in the same boat. They were alone, and abandoned inside, probably even Cid was. And all most of them were doing was reaching out to get their point across, reaching out for some connection. Unafraid of the consequences.

That took guts. Guts that Squall, until that point, had not possessed. Guts that Cid probably didn't possess even now. Men like Squall and Cid thought reaching out to others was a stupid endeavor. Worthless, futile, people were going to vanish, and they would end up alone anyway, so what was the point? But that was just it. The reaching out _was_ the point.

Squall was not a romantic. He did not wax rhapsodic about Rinoa's mouth. He didn't much care about her lovely eyes (in fact, some creep at the Deling City meeting had told her her eyes were like the moon reflected on the ocean, and he'd privately found amusement in her response: "An ocean of what? Wrongfully-exported timber? My eyes are _brown_.") He'd only liked finding, quite unexpectedly, that Rinoa was a complete person too.

She didn't let him forget it. She was all stubbornness and strength – really, she was. People assumed otherwise, because she wasn't SeeD, and because she couldn't fight as well as they could. Because she babied her dog. Because she owned an alarming number of pink things. But Rinoa was someone who, in her heart of hearts, was always raising a complaint. Always determined to poke and nudge. Always had a cause – could not function without one, which was probably some kind of disorder, but there you had it – and who was always looking to find other people to link with, to help, to harangue, to fight for. She was always trying to connect. Invariably, at some point she'd gotten through to Squall. And that was when he'd learned that other human beings were fantastic universes, centers of judgment in their own right. And he could go through life ignoring that. Or he could come clean about what he was thinking, open up, express himself, and let them that see that he was a universe, too. He liked that latter option better. It was more courageous. And it meant he felt less alone alone. He wasn't going through life so hurt from when people had left him or dismissed him that he'd deluded himself into thinking he as the only creature in existence.

Only. Just as he'd discovered this new form of courage—

Fate had plopped him into a job where courageously expressing himself didn't matter. And in fact he was better off not doing it. He was a surprisingly sarcastic and wry person. He might now be open to making and maintaining one or two or four (no more; baby steps) friendships. But he wasn't friendly by nature; he was kind of an asshole. He had a lot of loss and anger he'd never dealt with. Not hate, not really. He didn't think he had it in him to hate people. He wasn't so troubled as all that. But frustration. Pain. Abandonment.

Only professional duty demanded that he keep all that under wraps. Never express it. Play the game like Cid had, never really showing his true colors.

Now, Squall loved Garden, inasmuch as love meant 'never had any other home and therefore would probably die for this one.' But the fact was – the place was interfering with what he really wanted to do. Let his feelings out. Let out his inner jerk. Not a lot. Not for _everybody_, or even for most people, because most people were still a headache. But just a little. Just to connect with the other jerks, _his_ jerks. The ones who – like Cid – had come to mean something to him in spite of himself. Just to remind them he existed; he wasn't some walking ghost they could shove away on a whim.

Possibly he'd saved the world and come out with the wrong lesson after it. Maybe the point had been that he'd been perfect as he was, and as long as he kept on ignoring everybody he could keep his mouth shut, never bother with anyone, and that was alright. Everything would still be puppies and rainbows. Here, Squall, see? You were a real sack of shit, an abandoned orphan with a chip on your shoulder, for upwards of ten years. But you pulled through (somehow; he still didn't know how he'd done it), and now you've been rewarded. Garden Command. Now put your game face on, and shut up. We've got Commanding to do. Not connection.

But if he chose that, then he would out on all these universes: his own, and other people's too. He would become, for lack of a better word, time compressed. Stuck in this weird state where he was the only living creature worth a damn, the center of everything, and perfectly happy to be achingly lonely.

Fuck that.

Only not, because actually that was the perfect attitude to have – oh, not for Squall the human being, trying and failing and driving Deling politicians to drink with his sarcastic retorts. But for Squall the Commander, Cid's successor, stone-faced and alone.

He'd covered roughly a quarter of the crater's rim by now. The Commander in him had been taking mental notes the whole time. The human being? Just sort of quietly fuming. This was permissible because the Commander hadn't noticed anything the slightest bit odd. He'd sent Shiva to the edge a few more times. She always came back with the same mental images: chasm floors full of fat and happy cactuars.

But now he caught something in the far background of one of her visions.

Dust clouds. Not uncommon in the Kashkabald, except that these seemed more like frenzied dust tornadoes. Of thick black dust.

Squall sent Shiva back out to the edge for a second look. She went and returned. It wasn't a fluke. Black dust and smoke in the center of the crater. He revved up the engine and rode a little ways further along the eastern side, then sent her out again, just to be sure. And found that they could be sure. The dust clouds were getting bigger. Something incredibly chaotic was happening out in the middle of the Egabi.

The Egabi was an odd formation. A giant crater in the middle of the desert, it made an almost perfect circle – no one had ever checked to be sure it wasn't, as far as Squall knew – and it had a strange, unnatural quiet about it. It was a trick of the area. To the West, the Almaj mountains loomed imposingly, and to the South, a brush shoreline gave way to the most chaotic stretch of sea on the planet. People didn't thrive in the Egabi. Hadn't since the days of the Ancient Centrans. The place was cactuar territory, home to roving creatures that escaped cactuar island and migrated to the crater for unknown biological reasons.

The crater, and all the Eastern reaches of Centra, essentially belonged to Esthar. In the bad old days of the Estharian-Galbadian War, the territory had been disputed. But Esthar had won it for the most part; the Sorceress Adel had been startlingly good at getting whatever she wanted through sheer militaristic aggression. And she'd wanted all of Centra, reputedly the ancestral home of Hyne and the sorceresses. When Esthar had closed its borders, though, all expansionist aims had been dropped. Official control of the territory was once again up in the air. Cautious settlers like the Kramers had ventured into the Western reaches of the islands, and Esthar had let it be. Nowadays all the city cared about were the oilfields in the Northeast desert.

Still. Anything they found out here, they had to at least consider reporting to Laguna.

That thought put Squall in an even worse mood than before. He knew Laguna had just not known about him. A man like Laguna could never have intended to abandon him. And nothing about the way Squall's life had turned out was really Laguna's fault, unless you went back to his very conception, because, yes, that had been Laguna all the way. That was what fatherhood meant.

The problem was that Squall had been inside the man's head, stuck in there like a GF, as connected as to another person as he could get.

And they had _nothing_ in common.

Laguna had never felt alone, not a day in his life. He'd been raised in a world that hadn't even contemplated the extent of the war to come, born the cherished son of a cheerful Deling City stenographer and a Deling palace guard. He'd made fast friends with Ward and Kiros during military training (a process he'd half-assed as much as possible) and stumbled into a career buying and selling stories out of Timber, peddling his words. Laguna was fairly free with words.

The only thing he had in common with Squall was that eventually the world had decided he was born for heroism, and rewarded him accordingly with a job he didn't like very much. But that was the thing Squall liked least about himself. He didn't particularly want to engage in father-son bonding over the fact that he and Laguna were both ill-suited to the fates thrown on them. Fate was an asshole. It had given Squall a father who could never possibly understand Squall, a mismatch, a connection error.

So Squall would have Xu alert him if they found anything out here. He would keep it professional. Distant. In fact, maybe he'd have Xu alert Laguna to the existence of the crater, period. Laguna was bound to have no idea what was going on in the furthest reaches of his domain. But if someone told him, then possibly Esthar could take the whole thing off their hands.

As he rounded the edge of the crater, he considered going down there himself anyway, just to check it out. Squall was no coward. Black dust didn't scare him. Neither did sinkholes. But a moment's reflection quelled the impulse. That was pointless showing off: a silly, grandiose adventurer's gesture. They had no idea what sinkholes in the Egabi pointed to; it could have been nothing, though to go by Cid's attitude something was up. But either way. Nothing said Garden had to deal with it. And if Cid thought they should, then maybe he should start pleading his case to the appropriate authorities (Squall and Xu) like every other run-of-the-mill client had to.

Squall cleared his half of the crater in an hour, then stood surveying the still-growing dust cloud as he waited for Quistis and Zell. They appeared on the horizon in a whirl of dirt and sand, and as soon as they'd parked their bikes and removed their helmets, Zell said, "Did you see? We should head down there."

"No," Quistis said. "No, we shouldn't. It's stupid. We don't know that there's anything to gain. It would be pointless grandstanding—"

Her vidphone went off. She held it up so they could see who was trying to reach her. Cid.

"Well, never mind. He wants us to meet him," she said, "Down on the crater floor."

It was still pointless grandstanding. But now it was on a client's orders. Cid's orders.

Squall almost wished he could say no.

* * *

Cid packed his patient off on a class-C Garden transport. Fast. Sleek. Painted a cheerful blue, like a fishing vessel out of FH, to disguise the fact that it had once belonged to bunch of mercenaries, and had fallen into Cid's hands only because he'd claimed it as part of his retirement package.

His patient scowled at the color. Cid blinked. He'd never understood this particular student.

"The local sorceress knows all about it," Cid said. "She can tell you more. But it's on the peninsula. The black grounds, they call it these days. Whatever you do, don't go for Deling City's. You might be recognized in Deling."

His patient's scowl deepened. Cid fussed over the blanket, the battered grey coat underneath, the bandages. His patient waved him away. Cid programmed the transport for Dollet, then hopped off just as it pushed off from the shore.

With this done, he sent a message to Quistis.

He did not tell the kids everything he knew about the Egabi straight off. It was nothing personal. He just worried about them getting down too quickly, figuring it out, coming back in time to stumble into the house, to see the mess and grime and blood, and all the old books Cid had dug up. Research.

This way, they'd get down into the crater slowly. They'd piece it together little by little. Squall, Quistis, and Zell were smart, so he had no doubt they'd figure it out eventually. Just not right away. And this would buy Cid and his guest some more time.

Although, come to think of it, Cid wondered if he could get them to understand, to help. There had to be a way. They were all connected. All of them. Every single one of them had a role to play. Sometimes an awful one. But still a role. And maybe they just needed to step into each other's shoes sometimes.

He pondered this while he filled canteens. He had resolved to pack everyone a canteen. Of course, he was sure they'd all have one on them. They were SeeDs, and they were prepared for any climate, even for the Egabi, which was a hot, dry, awful place. Cid himself had written the manual on how to survive it, as he'd made the crossing from Esthar to the Orphanage a fair few times in his life, and understood exactly what one needed to survive there. So he knew exactly what they'd be packing with them.

But still. It was the thought that counted. His kids would need something to drink.

* * *

I've omitted Zell's birthday (twice! Poor Zell). Possibly birthdays aren't a big deal in FF8 world, or maybe in Balamb they celebrate name days instead. Either way, I will try to make it up to him.


	6. Chapter 6

The library was closed when Selphie, Irvine, and Rinoa reached Deling City. It was the early morning of the 18th, and the place didn't open for alumni until the evenings. Besides this, Rinoa needed her access pass. Only she'd left it at her father's house and she didn't want to go there to stay, not if she could help it. She'd already spent a fairly stressful weekend there with Squall. And she didn't want to make a thing out of just dropping by for overnight visits, like she and Caraway were on good terms.

They weren't. She went home only because every time she visited Deling City she was refused access to the better class of hotel. After Edea's very public (and in-hindsight-to-the-public horrifying) assassination of President Vinzer Deling, Deling City hoteliers tended to announce themselves fully booked when a sorceress dropped by. And the seedy places would take her, but not without leaking it to all the papers. She could sign under a false name in any other city, but in Deling they triple-checked your identity. Paranoia ran high. It always had; paranoia was a part of the Galbadian national character, embedded deep in the citizens' collective mind after the war with Adel. Embedded, and growing deeper roots every day.

"How about we swing by my house, but we stay at your place?" she asked Irvine. He'd let it slip once that his dad lived on the outskirts. Or. Well. More specifically, he'd let slip that his dad lived on the outskirts so that he could commute more effectively to his job in the D-District. Irvine's dad might have been present at the time they'd staged a prison break, but no big deal. Honestly. No big deal, Rinoa. He wasn't attached to the D-District or to his dad; neither the place nor the personality of the man had been conducive to those little familial rituals like Take Your Son To Work Day. He hadn't talked to his dad in nearly a year; hadn't seen him in more than that; didn't even know anything about what the man was up to, if he lived or died, what he liked to do, or even what he did do on a day-to-day basis.

Rinoa could relate. But, come to think of it, if Irvine had known the latter, it might have come in useful during their rather haphazard prison break.

"You're suggesting we stay at my dad's place," Irvine said. Something about him seemed tired now that he'd discovered the depths of this week's smear campaign. Rinoa couldn't blame him. But she wasn't asking just to avoid Caraway. The outskirts made a certain amount of strategic sense. That was where Squall would have decided to stay: out of sight, where they wouldn't alert anyone who happened to be illegally using GF magic in the middle of the city.

"I don't think that's a good idea," Selphie said, putting a hand lightly on Irvine's arm. He seemed surprised at the action, but he smoothed it over quickly, and went back to looking light, easygoing, and unaffected by everything – that unique Kinneas slacker cocktail of emotions.

"Well," Rinoa said, "It's inconspicuous. Out of the way. Right? So what would be your preferred alternative?"

"Rot," said Selphie.

"It's not rot!" Rinoa said.

"No," Irvine said casually. "She's right. That would be my preferred alternative. To rot. To just rot."

Rinoa blinked at them.

"I miss when Garden could just book a hotel for you in advance," Selphie said.

"You got that kind of treatment?" said Irvine. He whistled between his teeth. "Nice for you."

"Only once," said Selphie. "It was in the good days. The glory days. We had this silly client out in Timber, some rebel princess who couldn't strategize for beans and avoided her father at all costs—"

"Hey!" Rinoa said.

Okay, maybe she deserved that a little. Her idea had still been a perfectly strategically sound one.

But she was outvoted. Caraway's mansion it was.

The maid let them in as soon as she saw Rinoa. Or rather, she let them in as far as the atrium off of the main staircase, then muttered something under her breath, then retreated into the kitchen downstairs, performing the bisecting cross of Hyne all the way. Rinoa recited the stupid old rite to ward off sorceresses in her head, almost on reflex, as she saw the woman do this. _Magic half to magic half. Human to stay human_.

Rinoa missed the old staff, the ones her mom had hired years ago, who'd been here all through her childhood. Most of them had been Timberi, and they'd disappeared from the household soon after Rinoa ran off the join the Forest Owls. Nothing personal, Caraway had explained to her. He just had never before considered what kinds of propaganda they might have been feeding his daughter.

Rinoa had wanted to track them down, offer money, get them jobs as Garden staff – do _something_. But most people from her old life saw her as changed. Her old friends. Her associates in Timber. Her few sympathetic contacts in the Deling Foreign Office, who'd known her dad for years and felt fairly bad for her. They said no, no; we couldn't possibly accept your help. You've helped us so much, after all. You're such a helpful girl.

And what they meant was: we don't want it. Go away. Your help could be dangerous now. You're a _witch_.

Rinoa would not have been able to bear it if Undine, her old nanny, treated her like that. Carefully. Half fearfully. Always looking like she were thinking of the ruin of Trabia Garden, or the Lunar Cry attack on Esthar. As though Rinoa were inexorably linked to all that, which unfortunately Rinoa kind of was, if only by accident. She could have borne it even less from Tiria the undermaid. Or Frantz, the butler. They had been like family growing up. These new people weren't family; it didn't matter so much if they were scared of her.

"Not friendly with the staff?" Selphie said lightly. "We had this Shumi Guardian up at T-Garden who hated us, I swear. He was some kind of NorG spy, I think. Sent up from Balamb. Hated students on principle."

"Small-minded," Irvine said, wiping his boots thoughtfully on Caraway's entry mat.

"That's what I think!" said Selphie. She was looking down at the entry mat herself, so she clearly noticed that it was there. But she didn't bother to wipe her boots. Selphie was Rinoa's primary girl talk confidant; she simply had an aura about her that prompted people to tell her things. So she knew all about the mass dismissal of the old housemaids, Caraway's role in quashing sixteen Timber rebellions to date, the various deaths he signed off on with nary a care; and how he prized his job above human decency, and order above all, and Rinoa somewhere in the middle, above the rest of humanity, but below intangible things like his good name and his military record.

Selphie was making it known that she would stomp through this guy's house with muddy boots if she damn well felt like it. Rinoa felt a sudden rush of love for Selphie.

"I wouldn't've let it bother me, Selphie," Irvine said. "That Shumi Guardian, I mean." He waved one hand as though dismissing this unknown person, and with the other thoughtfully hung up his cap. But his voice was loud enough to be heard down in the kitchen and probably on the upper landing, too. "People like to scapegoat where they can, right?"

He was obviously not just talking about the Shumi Guardian. Rinoa felt a sudden rush of love for the both of them.

"Shhh," she said. "Lay off the heavy-handed analogies or whatever. She's just a maid. She probably doesn't mean to be—"

"Nobody _means_ to mistrust and mistreat you," Selphie said, rolling her eyes.

"I feel bad for them, honestly," Irvine said, still too loudly. "Ruled by their fear."

"Right?" said Selphie. "Pathetic."

"Especially since they're afraid of _you_," said Irvine. He spread his arms out in a silent supplicant gesture to Hyne, indicating that he, privately, felt that fearing Rinoa was a ridiculous notion. That was comforting of him. Rinoa wished he could be right.

Selphie said, "Yeah. Afraid of you and not your friends. We're scarier. I mean, Squall? Imagine what he'd do of he found you being treated like this."

"I'd rather not," Rinoa said, smiling a little. "I kept it from him last week, and he was bad enough then."

"You shouldn't've bothered. They shouldn't be scared of your magic," Irvine said. "They should learn to be scared that you've been adopted into the Orphanage Gang."

"Very bad company," Selphie put in.

"Desperadoes and ruffians," said Irvine.

"Lost kids. Lost souls. No homes," Selphie said. "No cares, no _rules_."

"I hear one of them's the Terror of Timber," Rinoa said.

"That's nothing," said Selphie, holding her hands up like she was about to launch into a particularly horrifying campfire ghost story. "They're the Terror of Timber, Trabia, and Esthar. The Scourge of Dollet. The unlikely rescuers of Deling City from the clutches of that one sorceress that one time. But this does not recommend them, since this city? Kinda sucks."

"They'll save your world and they don't even care, the jerks," Rinoa said, laughing despite herself.

"So big-headed," said Selphie.

"Ready to seduce away your sons and daughters," put in Irvine with a wink.

"Yes," came Caraway's voice from the upper landing. "I can see that."

_Ugh_.

All merriment died down. This was Caraway's talent. He sucked the joy out of every room he entered. Rinoa supposed this came in useful for him in his daily routine, as a big-name bully and all.

Oddly, he and Squall had hit it off last weekend. They'd reached a grim and silent accord. Caraway had made it clear that he didn't hold Rinoa becoming a sorceress against _Squall_; that was all the inevitable consequence of his daughter's own poor life choices. Now she'd irreparably ruined her future. And Squall had made it clear that he didn't agree on that count, and that furthermore he would be taking charge of any threats against Rinoa's safety for the next foreseeable eternity, so he thought her chances in life were fairly good, actually.

Caraway had liked that. He respected a little bit of overbearing arrogance in a man.

Squall was – had proven himself to be – the single most heroic, self-sacrificing, romantic person on the planet. Rinoa was lucky to have him.

She also sometimes found him a little obnoxious. Rinoa had an unfortunate history of falling for men who were good at making bold proclamations and grand gestures, larger than life men, men on General Caraway's level. Squall was not the worst of the ones she'd picked in this respect; he had a streak of normal teenage surliness that undercut his heroic image, and he was frequently very down to earth, only too happy to bring anyone down from their grand pedestal. The secret champion of the sarcastic underdog. That said, he was still her Knight. Tied to her for all infinity. Would die for her. Completely responsible for her wellbeing.

It was a little like being someone's child. Rinoa had had a few months to get used to the whole sorceress and knight thing. And she hadn't. Gotten used to it, that is. She didn't like the feeling of it. She wanted to be safe, secure very very badly. But more than that, she wanted to be safe on her own terms. She didn't want a bodyguard-slash-babysitter looking over her shoulder her whole life. She didn't particularly want to be a sorceress, when it came to that.

There she and Caraway were in agreement, she supposed.

"Friends?" Caraway said. He did not sound pleased. He did not, as a rule, approve of SeeDs as friends, nor did he approve of B-Garden. B-Garden was the home of the gutless nouveau riche, a way for poor, unimportant, otherwise worthless kids to get money quickly, provided they had little to no ties to any particular region, no real loyalty or honor (in Caraway's estimation), and didn't die taking the SeeD test. He'd never liked Timber rebels, Dolletian activists, the countrified bumpkins of Winhill, or the strange cheerful wintry folk of Trabia. But in his mind they were all better than most SeeDs. They at least had roots somewhere, strong sympathies with their local governments, patriotism, honest desire to die for Hyne and country. Whereas kids who flocked to Balamb inevitably sold their honor to the highest bidder. Cid Kramer had long demonstrated a blatant disregard for any kind of moral code, and his lot had been known to fight on both sides of a conflict, as long as they were paid to do it and got to skulk back in the end to their little island, which stank of fish and the working class, to hole up far from where Deling City could reach them. SeeDs were almost worse than Estharians, almost worse than pacifists. Of all the peoples of the earth, in Caraway's ideal universe, the SeeDs would be first against the wall. Even before the FH crowd. SeeDs weren't gutless pacifists, but they were problems. Caraway could make peace with one or two, particularly if that one or two happened to be tethered to his daughter by honor and magic, duty-bound to protect her. But in general to mention the name SeeD in his house was to point out a bite bug or geezard, a creature of degraded status and ill repute.

This was the image of SeeD that Rinoa had grown up with.

"You know Selphie and Irvine, right?" said Rinoa. "They left their respective gardens for Balamb, remember? They chose the SeeD life. Isn't that nice?"

Selphie and Irvine seemed confused at this rejoinder, because they didn't know Caraway like she knew him. But they could probably piece together that this was a dig. She couldn't resist needling him. Just a little.

"Grand," Caraway said, the way people pronounced a sentence of execution. "You're more social than normal lately."

"Not really," Rinoa said. "I've always had friends."

Had. Her reception with class A last week had been chilly, at best. Oh, Rinoa, you're _alive_. What a relief. When we heard you'd dropped out and run off to Timber of all places; we were all sure you'd died. You're so _dramatic_, Rinoa. You must _love_ being all over the papers. What's being a sorceress like? Leave it to you to soak up a piece of Hyne; you always did like a little attention. Like that time your chocobo won the gold at the track, yeah?

They, a cabal of nine elite Galbadian heirs and heiresses, the only kids Rinoa had ever been allowed to talk to growing up, hid a barb in every statement. Rinoa had come to see this as typical of Deling City, but it wasn't, not really. Irvine was from Deling City, but a different kind of Deling entirely; where fathers worked tirelessly from dawn to dusk in service of the regime with no mansions or grand parties as a reward, where no one got to go to prep school, and where the army was one's certain future. Caraway had always intimated that people like Irvine could be classed somewhere between cannon fodder and babbling infants one had to look after for their own good. But Rinoa was coming to prefer them to her old schoolmates.

Which didn't mean she'd been unhappy to see her mates. It had been almost a relief, actually. She expected them to look down on her. The SeeDs saw her as a pretty rich girl and not much more, lucky in every way. But to her fellow Galbadians Rinoa had always been weird. It almost didn't matter that she was a sorceress now. They would have been poking fun at her anyway for something else if she hadn't been. For always being the one to raise her hand and argue facts that everyone in Vinzer Deling's realm knew with certainty were Wrong, and besides this Traitorous. For causing her father so much trouble. For using Caraway's good name to let her get away with things a lesser girl would have been shot for or imprisoned over. For having a cabaret singer mother. For looking a tiny, tiny bit Timberi.

Yes, everyone on the Galbadian continent was related, but Timber had once been the access point for Esthar, and everyone knew the Timberi had intermarried with the ancestral Enemy. They had the general coloring of the Southern Galbadian continent, to be sure. But there was something about the eyes: dark, dark eyes. And so short. Rinoa was so lucky she was pretty. It would have been awful to be partially Estharian and ugly to boot, but then Timberi were generally attractive in a rough sort of way. No wonder Rinoa was so vain.

Horrible as it was to admit, after months and months of hearing that she was secretly Ultimecia herself, that sort of criticism was almost comforting to Rinoa. It was banal. Normal. It almost took for granted the idea that Rinoa was small and not special and definitely not likely to snap and attempt world takeover, like 95% of all sorceresses did in the end. And, when you got down to it, she had grown up with these people. She'd been to all the birthday parties (invited only to cater to her father, but still invited), she'd played on the same teams (rarely picked first or second or even eighth, but that was the old gang for you), and learned a fair number of their secrets. She didn't hate them, not really, not even if she resented some of them terribly and found them all to be stupid, utterly stupid. She just didn't really like them either. They existed in the same grey area as Caraway, as Seifer Almasy.

They were people she had to harden her heart against, because the truth was: they were very, very hurtful.

"Well, we'll head to my room now, if you don't mind," Rinoa said, brushing all that out of her mind for the time being.

"We have guest rooms," Caraway said, eyeing Irvine with distaste.

Irvine reached up to tip his hat in agreement, but he wasn't wearing it because he'd hung it up, so he settled for nodding, looking tired again. Selphie snorted in disgust.

"Why don't you just tell your father the truth, Rinoa?" she asked, very suddenly.

Rinoa and Irvine stared at her. The _truth_? Was she crazy? For all they knew, Caraway could be in on the whole hidden GF thing. He had no love for Xu and SeeD, and almost certainly would have looked the other way if he discovered someone defying Balamb Garden.

But Irvine seemed to instinctively trust Selphie. He always had a way of deferring to her, going along cautiously but still laying his neck out, riskier than he normally was, just because Selphie happened to be involved. He said, "C'mon now, Sef—" in what Rinoa had realized, four months into knowing him, was one of his fake tones, his dissembling tones, just a front. "C'mon now. We—we're just here for…Um."

He trailed off. Rinoa would have been hard pressed to believe he wasn't someone attempting to come up with a false story. He just managed to look so shifty as he spoke.

"A GF thing?" he offered. The actual truth. But somehow in the mouth of an overly-casual, slouching, suspicious, working-class Deling boy, it looked like a lie.

"Do you think I'm a fool, boy?" snapped Caraway.

"Honestly, Kinneas," Selphie said. She was less convincing than he was, playing her role of aggrieved superior just a little too perfectly, like her training in deceit stemmed mostly from rehearsals for the Trabia Garden Festival Committee's next theatrical revue. Which it doubtlessly did. But Rinoa thought Caraway was buying it, and that was the important thing. And then Selphie saluted him, which was good form. Caraway loved a good grovel.

"It's nothing to do with you, sir," Selphie said. "In fact, I think our aims align."

"Is that so?" Caraway said. _That_ was maybe pushing it too far. Caraway's alliances with the SeeDs extended as far as agreeing to let them take the fall for murdering a sorceress, which at that time had been to him like setting cockroaches on a rabid sewer rat growing too big to be contained. If they died, so what? They were roaches. And maybe they could get rid of the other, more dangerous pest problem before the life was stamped out of them.

Selphie pressed on. "I've clearance to reveal three facts. One, the rampant dissatisfaction at G-Garden, SeeD Kinneas's old stomping ground, is a cause for concern—" she managed to make it sound like herein lay the whole reason for bringing SeeD Kinneas, clearly a sorry excuse for a SeeD, along in the first place.

"Two, certain allegations made by Martine at an internal Garden investigation. Martine revealed that he and certain G-Garden cadets sought to use the assassination of the sorceress seven months ago as a chance to stage their own coup—" Oh. Good one. The idea that one of Caraway's pawns might have schemed against him was something Caraway was open to. He was paranoid, and instinctively mistrusted anyone below him, which was nearly everyone.

"And three. The possible existence of a similar plot in the works at this moment, aiming to lure the Sorceress Rinoa to Galbadia in order to accomplish the same aims. Kill her, and take over Deling City as its saviors."

This was believable. Half of the world wanted the sorceress dead, and was sure accomplishing it could tilt the balance of power in their favor, because people were supposed to hail you and adore you when you took out a sorceress, right? At least that was the theory.

"Rinoa is safe," Caraway said, appalled. "Particularly for as long as she is under my roof!" The last point really got to him. He'd always viewed people tangling with Rinoa as people tangling with him. He loved her in his own way; Rinoa knew this. It was just that his form of love involved assuming that Rinoa was simply an extension of his own personal sovereignty, a possession you didn't mess with unless you wanted to suffer.

"Sir," Irvine said, looking pitiful and apologetic, and pulling the look off pretty well to boot. "We want that to be the case as much as you do."

"We aim to prevent any internal Garden strife from spilling over into your home and your daughter's life," Selphie said. She'd been sneaking glances at Rinoa the whole time, as if determined to telepathically force her to say the right thing.

Rinoa wasn't sure what the right thing was. Not right away. But then she thought like a SeeD.

"That's why I hired them as soon as Squall told me all about it," she said to Caraway. "To deal with this whole mess before it becomes a real problem."

"You hired them to bring you back to a city where you know you're in danger?" said Caraway, openly furious by now. "You're even sillier than I gave you credit for, Rinoa!"

Oh, for. That was just stupid. Every city was a city where she was in danger, at this point. She hadn't been out of danger since her father decided to meddle with assassinating the sorceress Edea and had inadvertently set up a colossal skirmish between the gardens, leading to the battle where Rinoa soaked up her first set of sorceress powers.

Or earlier. Since he gave the order to murder six Timberi rebels and their families and left a copy sitting carelessly on his desk, where his daughter could see it and subsequently decide that maybe it was time to do something about all his shady dealings. If he was going to complain about putting her in danger, he needed to think about maybe not setting up these vast militaristic chess games where he just assumed everyone else's life was up for grabs. It was tacky. And stupid. And highly hazardous to her health, and for that matter to the health of entirely unrelated innocents who had never done anything to Fury Caraway except not bend at the knee to his stupid country.

"You know I can't sit around if someone is trying to kill me!" Rinoa told him. "I don't just ignore a threat."

"Well, you must have received something from me," Caraway snapped. "Dismissed, the three of you. To your room and the West Wing guest rooms while you're in the house." Typical. Her room was in the East Wing. He wanted to separate them as much as possible. "If you are still here tonight then I expect to see you at dinner, Rinoa. You other two can eat in your rooms if you're here. Accomplish your objectives and then get out."

Of his house, or of his country? The subtext was unclear. He turned on his heel, and left.

Selphie waited until he was out of earshot. Then she said, in a low voice, "You know how some people say Hyne was just sliced in half? Not, like, that his skin came off, but that humans just cut him down the middle? I think your father is the half of Hyne's pecker that got cut off and thrust at the world. The part with no magic and even less sense of humor! Just a walking, humorless penis."

She sounded so deadly serious, so unlike her normal bubbly self, that Irvine's eyebrows shot up, and he bit his lip to keep from laughing. Rinoa herself had to fight down a grin.

"He's going to be sending someone along to listen in on us," she warned them. "And to make sure we go where he says. So let me just go collect my pass, and we can get out of here and talk elsewhere."

She headed upstairs.

"Works for me," she heard Irvine say. "There was no point in wiping off my boots, was there? Never been in a more unwelcoming place."

"Yep," Selphie told him cheerfully, delighting in leaving dirty trails on Caraway's expensive rugs as she hopped from the first step of the stair to the second. "You're too soft, Irvine. Too pure. You hide it, but I'm onto you."

"Yeah?" Irvine said. He sounded pleased.

"Yeah. I'm onto you, dweeb," Selphie repeated.

* * *

They scaled the rim of the Egabi, which was not easy by any means. They had equipment for rock climbing loaded onto their bikes, since all missions in the Kashkabald left one contemplating the possibility of having to climb the Almaj in order to make a tight escape. But the crater rim was smoother than the nearby mountains. There was less to grab on to. It was slow going all the way down. Their clothes suffered as a result. Quistis kept cursing because hers were new, purple, professional, and neat. Until she had to scale the Egabi, and they became stained, sort of a dusty blue, ripped, and grimy.

Squall took off his tailored military jacket and just tossed it down halfway. He was sweating so much that it was becoming a hindrance. He seemed unconcerned if it turned out some cactuar made off with it before he could retrieve it; he just needed to have it off, period.

Zell, for his part, could feel his hair deflate. He was grateful that he was just wearing his old clothes. No new jackets or sleek outfits for him; he was as unrecognizable now, just as he was, just as normal old _Zell_, as he'd been seven months ago. That had kind of galled at first. It was because he was from Balamb, and Balamb was considered dinky and backwards and full of sad little fishermen. Forever a country mouse, that kind of thing. But then he didn't get picked on by most of the papers, and his clothing was just as reliable and old and unassuming now as it had always been, so he'd learned to see the bright side.

Also, it meant he moved faster than the other two. He didn't have anything to prove if they were caught out by some roving reporter, so he had opted for comfort over professionalism. And besides this he wasn't learning the limits of his own clothing choices; he already knew them. If you could T-board in it, you could probably fight a war in it. The likelihood of injury was much the same.

As if to spite them, Cid was waiting at the bottom. Looking very neat and not at all out of breath, just as un-athletically middle-aged as he'd always been, but completely unruffled, like he hadn't had to scale the side of the Egabi at all.

"How'd you get down here?" Zell said.

"I took the stairs," Cid said placidly.

There were stairs? Cid pointed to his left. Zell picked up Squall's jacket, shooed away some baby cactuars, and headed off in that direction. He soon found some elaborately carved niches, each set deeper than the last, and all replete with strange images of ancient vegetation and Ancient Centran script and blocky Ancient Centran figures. They led all the way up to the top of the crater. Well, Hyne be damned. There were _stairs_.

"You couldn't have told us this?" Zell said, coming back to Cid. He was furious for Squall and Quistis's sakes. This was, again, Cid all over. Working for Cid was like living inside one of those complicated but incredibly stupid Estharian holographic games. You had someone outlining some quest, with an object to retrieve or a princess to rescue or something. But they never told you how to do it, so you had to play all these dumb mini games and engage in all these roundabout, unnecessary battles. Until you found whatever you were looking for, and then you gained some advantage, like an airship or a shortcut back to start. Or the knowledge that there were _stairs_. Only by that point you no longer needed that knowledge because you'd done the task already. You should have been given that crucial information before attempting the dumb quest in the first place.

"Didn't I tell you?" Cid said. "I thought I did." He reached for his old-fashioned comm. phone. "Hmmm," he said. "Looks like I forgot to hit 'send.'"

Zell leaned against the crater wall and smacked one hand against his forehead. _Cid_. Hyne. Something was up here. But Zell didn't know just what.

"Water?" Cid offered. Zell had some on him, but he took some of Cid's anyway, just to conserve his in case Quistis or Squall needed it later. They had less endurance for these things than he did. Also, he privately considered it a small screw you to Cid to take his help without really needing it.

He surveyed the black dust cloud in the distant center of the crater as he drank. He would have expected it to be bigger from down here. But it seemed to be getting smaller? Somehow?

"It's winding down," Zell realized. "Whatever's going on. The sinkhole forming?"

"What?" Cid said. "Oh, yes. Let's save explanations until Squall and Quistis get here, though. I don't want to have to say it twice."

"You could have just put it in the mission report," Zell pointed out.

"Well, let's just say I might not have wanted anything crucial to fall into Estharian hands," Cid said evasively. "I'll explain when they're down here. It's taking them some time. I shouldn't mention the stairs, should I?"

Zell stared at him.

"Didn't think so," Cid said. He leaned against the wall as well, where there was maximum shade. Not that he looked particularly overheated or rumpled or uncomfortable or anything. They waited together.

"The Ancient Centrans," Cid told him, for no particular reason that Zell could discern, as they watched the black dust die down, "Were a stocky, powerful people."

"What?" Zell said.

"They weren't very tall," Cid clarified. "They were compact. Powerful chests and large rib cages. Their greatest cities were on the peaks of mountains, and they carved out strange structures to reach down and up and down again. One needed to be small and built strong, rather like you, to survive as an Ancient Centran. Their skeletal remains confirm it."

Zell stared at him. Cid was an Ancient history buff. Who knew? Zell was a modern history buff. He preferred to read logs of the Galbadian-Estharian war, the rise and fall of the Dolletians, the founding of FH, the eradication of the Estharian tribes. And the popular history of the rise and fall of Pupurun as a social tool.

Zell had hidden depths. So, apparently, did Cid.

"Been doin' some reading in your retirement?" Zell asked.

"Here and there," Cid said. "Oh, look, Squall."

Squall landed surprisingly gracefully at the bottom of the crater. Then he spoiled the effect by gracelessly taking Cid's canteen from Zell's hands.

"Yours or Cid's?" he asked. Zell waved him to Cid.

"Good," Squall said. "I have my own. But since you brought us down here, Cid, I'm taking yours." He took a swig, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It was a careless, tired, attractive gesture. Zell almost forgave Cid for the stairs thing.

Cid seemed unaffected by Squall's sudden drop in professional manners.

"I brought one for each of you," he said. "Look, here's Quistis. Here you go, dear."

Quistis, apparently less passive aggressive than both of her counterparts, waved him off and drank from her own.

"I'm good, I'm good," she said. "The dust is going!"

She was right. It was a tiny thing now, just a fog over the ground in the distance. Zell was willing to bet that these were the aftereffects of sinkhole formation. But why did it matter?

"As you guessed, Zell," Cid said, "This is how the sinkholes form. Here and in the ruins on the North Island, but I wouldn't bet that there aren't smaller ones forming elsewhere on the continent, or even in the surrounding oceans. These are simply the only ones I've discovered. Each one tends to open at a different time. The ruins sinkhole opens at nighttime; this one appears at approximately oh-seven-hundred each day. We can approach when the dust dies down—"

"Why," Squall said flatly.

"Well, Squall, the dust does get into my lungs, and I'm not as young as I used to be, ha, ha—"

"Why are we bothering to approach at all?" Squall said. "Make the case for me, Cid. You're the client here. Your objectives are to figure out why this is happening. I decide the means. Maybe I think the best way to do this is to throw the problem at Esthar. This is their territory."

"Well, you really need to approach the sinkhole to answer that question," Cid said easily.

Squall's normal blank expression became downright mutinous.

"I'll just go," Zell said flatly, hoping to stave off any conflict. He didn't think Squall would stage a rebellion against their old Headmaster, but then you never knew with a guy like Squall. And if he did, Zell would have to go along with it because Squall was his friend and Cid was, well. Not. And someone working someplace like the _Dollet Bugle_ would be sure to find out, and then it would be published, and Ma would be heartbroken, like she'd been over the whole No, No I Was Not Just Leading The Library Girl On And This Is Not A Phase thing; and also people would probably decide Squall was the next Seifer Almasy or something, and that was so unfair that Zell couldn't even make himself consider it.

Strangely enough, for all their eager defense of Cid the day before, both Squall and Quistis seemed annoyed at Zell for offering to do what Cid wanted.

"We don't have enough information," Quistis said.

"Cid hasn't given us enough," Squall said.

"What do you think I'm doing right now?" Cid asked, far too cheerful for someone whose formerly-loyal pupils were circling him like wary sharks.

They couldn't argue with that. Zell went cautiously over to the center of the crater. Then he stopped, stunned. And just kind of stared.

"Sinkhole" was an inaccurate term. Cid must have picked it to capture the fact that these things were apparently opening and closing suddenly all over Centra. But it was better described as a pit. No. Better to use a flowery, old-school instructor word. An _abyss_. The thing formed a perfect gaping circle in the center of the crater, like the black, hollow earth opening wide a hungry mouth.

And, once again, Cid had neglected to mention the stairs. There were stairs leading down into it, circling around and around and around into the depths of the pit until they disappeared from sight. A few had carvings in Ancient Centran script, like the stairs leading into the crater. But these stairs were not made of earth and rock. They were shining, iridescent, beneath a thin film of the black dust. They glittered with all kinds of strange colors: white at first, then shifting to reds and purples and blues, only in shades that Zell had no words for. They looked slippery, but when Zell crouched down and put a careful hand on the uppermost step, a wide and sloping thing, he found that it wasn't slippery; not really. It was solid and sure. It just happened to gleam. It took him a minute to figure out what that gleam reminded him of, what it called up in his mind.

No.

That made no sense. It couldn't be crystal from the Crystal Pillar. The Crystal Pillar was likely Middle-Age Estharian or something, right? Zell struggled to recall if he'd had any lessons on it. Either way, it wasn't Ancient Centran. And it was far, far more dangerous than a sinkhole. And it came from the _moon_.

Zell jogged back to where Cid and the others were. He relayed all this breathlessly. Then he added, "Alright, so. Does it summon monsters somehow? Does it call them up? From the earth? What's down there?"

"You see my concern," Cid murmured. "Suppose whatever's down there has the properties of the Crystal Pillar? Esthar won't use theirs. We think. But suppose it fell into the hands of the Galbadians. Or suppose the Galbadians came to believe that the Estharians had two. How would the world react? It takes very little to tip us into outright war; you all know that. There's a real possibility that we could set the world up for another stunning loss of life. For the third time in two mere generations. No. If there's power down there, it should go to Garden."

They stared at him.

"That's…bold," Quistis said, after a moment.

"SeeDs are peacekeepers at best," said Squall. "Guns for hire at worst. Sorceress control all the time. We're not… Not a power in our own right. We don't need a Crystal Pillar."

"I'm not trying to make us a world power," Cid said gently. "But, assuming that whatever these holes lead to is as bad or worse than the Pillar, it is our responsibility to make sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Now. I did my best to prepare you all for situations exactly like this, correct? The unexpected. And though I wanted less famous SeeDs – it seemed to me that if we lost any of you heroes, word would get out rather quickly – now I believe Fate has brought you, the world's saviors, to me, here, on the verge of a great new adventure."

"You want us to climb down there," Zell said. "Even though we don't know what's there. Because it doesn't matter to you that it could be nothing, or something really dangerous. Whatever it is, Garden has to get it before anybody else does."

"Exactly," Cid said.

Squall shook his head and made an angry cutting motion with his hand. Apparently he wasn't into the idea.

"Thoughts, Squall?" Cid said. "You're not just here to follow my orders, you know. As you said, I'm only the client. You're the Commander."

For some reason, this made Squall look even angrier. He said, "Let me take a look at the thing."

Then he strode off, still holding Cid's canteen. They could make him out easily once he took his gunblade out and started walking around the rim of the pit; by now, the black dust was almost all gone. Zell wondered when the dust would start back up again. Assuming the sinkhole made as much dust leaving as it did appearing. The thing had to vanish at some point, right?

Squall began hacking at something with his blade. They could hear the clanging from here.

"Oh dear," Cid said. "That looks aggressive. Has Squall seemed more aggressive to either of you lately?"

Loyal Quistis sidestepped the question entirely. She said, "What I'd like to know is what he's hitting. Those stairs you described? Did they seem very solid and hard to cut to you, Zell?"

"Yeah," Zell said. "Also sorta gleamy. And priceless. Artifact-y."

"Oh dear," said Cid.

At one point Squall stopped, downed Cid's water, took out his own, and downed that too. Then he resumed his hacking. After about twenty-five minutes he came back, apparently satisfied. He had lost Cid's canteen.

"I threw it down," he clarified. "I didn't hear it hit the bottom. I also took a sliver from the top stair." He held it up: a shard of crystal he'd carved off, no mean feat. "We'll send it to an operative in Esthar. They'll test it against the material of the pillar without alerting the Estharians. If it's a match, then we'll do this. Otherwise, no."

He looked annoyed to have had to come to a decision at all. After a moment, he added, "We should also probably get someone who can read Ancient Centran on the line. Those markings mean something."

* * *

There was exactly one person left in all the Gardens who could read Ancient Centran. There had once been five, but the Gardens had lost them in sundry tragic ways during the Ultimecia war, so now there was just this guy, who was not the biggest pain in the ass out of their former collection of Ancient Centran history nerds, not by a long shot; but that didn't mean Xu particularly liked him.

His name was Nida. He'd spent the past seven months training people to fly Ancient Centran technology with techniques improvised by the more modern Estharians. He was polite and inoffensive most of the time, but if you caught him on a bad day he could bitch endlessly about his job, because the Estharian manner of doing things wasn't authentically Centran enough for his tastes.

Xu usually looked at him blankly and said, "Yes, Nida. Estharian is not Centran. There is nothing that is Centran. Centrans haven't existed for centuries."

Still, to his credit, Nida worked hard and could follow orders. He was one of those useful souls that slipped through Garden largely unnoticed, only to appear when his particular expertise was necessary. And then vanish again when it was not. Then everyone else would cease to be interested in him, and only his technology students would be entirely aware that he was alive.

In a better world, he might have been made Commander. He was sharp. Smart. Firstly in the sense that he knew a lot, like every good Garden kid did. He collected information. Knew how to analyze and make sense of it. It was either that or go crawling back to wherever he came from: Timber or Dollet or Balamb or even Deling City, if he was one of those few rebellious souls that said screw it to totalitarianism and hitched a ride to B-garden (which Xu suspected he wasn't; Nida, for all his cleverness, didn't exactly scream 'rebel.'). So Nida, like everyone else at Garden, had never had a choice when it came to raw knowledge.

But he was also intelligent in that irritating, competent, slightly off way that this whole new crop of young, weird SeeDs were. Squall. Selphie Tilmitt. Irvine Kinneas. Zell Dincht. Somehow these people pulled it together and didn't fail you in the final hour. Somehow. Hyne only knew how.

Xu was old guard, compared to them. Not by much, but still old guard. Cautious. Careful. Assessing. She hadn't made a spectacular wartime debut. SeeD had just been a way for her to get out of Dollet, and then she'd discovered that she liked it here. She liked batty Cid Kramer. She wanted to see Garden thrive. The world – very recently torn between the Galbadian continent in this corner and the Estharian continent in this corner – needed Garden. Cid took missions from anybody, sometimes even from people who couldn't pay, throwing himself on NorG in a crunch, which had been stupid of him, but that was Cid for you. When people could pay, too, he sometimes turned them down. Sides did not concern him. He'd thought B-Garden needed a kind of independent spirit; it had to separate itself from great powers; it had to be neutral, and, until the day the sorceress came, it ought to get by looking always to maintain a balance. Never siding _permanently_ with anyone too powerful. Rarely did he take the same client twice unless the payment was very very good; without monetary reward, he seemed to think this was unpardonable favoritism. But when he did it, it was because someone else somewhere (usually Deling City) was employing former SeeDs or G-Garden cadets or something.

Somehow, even with running the school and paying out their salaries, which to his credit Cid never shirked from, he'd made a slim, slim profit. And he'd also, inexplicably, fucked the world order. The defenseless backwaters of the universe, places like Dollet and Timber, needed Garden. Or else they would have been steamrolled, assimilated, eaten by Galbadia, gone the way of the Ancient Centrans. B-Garden was essential to their survival.

And now B-Garden needed their only SeeD who knew Ancient Centran. He'd taught it to himself. Probably after teaching himself some of those useless made up languages out of high-flown fantasy novels with elves and gnomes and lions and things; he seemed like the type.

"Steps to an unknown underground cavern," he repeated, as Xu explained the situation to him. He sounded thrilled. Actually thrilled. The very thought of being swallowed up by the earth made Xu claustrophobic, but Nida sounded delighted. "Possibly the origin of the myths of the Nether-Rippers, or the Duchy of Lost Children! Or else a genuine _igless dollia ritua_." Whatever in Hyne's name that was. Xu didn't do Ancient Centrans. She did trashy lit, a secret pleasure, and also pop-science books, because they were light reading with a bearable intellectual edge.

Nida continued, "Or a _ssemetria_. Can they photograph some of the carvings and send them to me? Or are you—" here his voice rose a few notches, like even contemplating the possibility was just too wonderful to bear, "Sending me out there?"

Hope colored his eyes. He sat taut and straight and nervous, the anti-Irvine Kinneas, practically vibrating at the notion of being ordered out to the buttcrack of the world so that he could help them decide whether or not to trick Esthar out of some weapon. That might or might not exist. On Esthar's rightful land. Squall had sounded like he didn't like that thought of all this when he'd explained it to Xu during their vid meeting. Possibly because he had high-profile relations in Esthar, and maybe also some weird honor code thing about taking missions there.

Squall was adorable sometimes. And by 'adorable', Xu meant 'what the hell, Squall.' How on earth did he think Garden had gotten their hands on most of their GFs? Did he assume every single one came from nearby Balamb? Because actually they'd always had a Take First, Alert the Appropriate Authorities Never approach. Xu had only made SeeD three years before him, and this had been one of the first things she'd bothered to learn about Garden's mysterious inner workings. Where it all came from. The GFs, the money, all of it. And the answer was shady places, shady Shumi, and more shady places. Cid and Edea Kramer had literally made something out of nothing with Garden. Magicians, both. How? By creeping into unnoticed places, gathering up the unnoticed kids, finding the unknown sources of magic and power…

They used all that power well, that was the thing. Or better than Deling City and Esthar would have. It was best for all these bright minds and all this power to go to Garden. Otherwise what was it there for? To be sacrificed to the war machines of two oft-despicable empires?

"No, I'm not sending you out there," Xu said offhandedly, sorting through the papers on her desk until she found the photos Squall had sent over. Nida deflated, absolutely crushed. She only vaguely noticed. It hadn't even occurred to her to send him until he'd mentioned it; she suspected Squall wouldn't appreciate it, for one thing. There were exactly four other SeeDs Squall worked well with; everyone else was a little unnerved by him, because he talked not to them, but sort of around them, in a grim and resolute way. The nervousness tended to annoy him. In response, over the past few months he'd brought no less than eight older SeeDs close to tears, probably accidentally, without even really trying, simply by force of frustration and sheer non-personality. That was just Squall's special touch with the Command position.

Nida might have been weird, but he didn't deserve that.

Also, he hadn't been trained for it. He had standard combat training like everyone at Garden, and he'd passed his SeeD test. But his chosen curriculum had focused on tactical support, not field missions. And Xu didn't like to send many untried, inexperienced people out. It was too risky. It introduced too may unknown variables, wild cards. She didn't like wild cards. She had enough of them to deal with without adding Nida to the mix.

Xu finally found the photos. She shoved them at Nida.

"Translate, then report to Squall. I want you on it around the clock. This is time-sensitive. You can send everything you find over to him as you find it. No waiting. Waiting gives Esthar time to discover us on their territory."

The alternative, from what Squall could tell her, would have been to head to the Centra ruins and work there first. They had to tackle that sinkhole at some point; it could very well house anything that the first did. But that was on disputed territory and they could at least make a legal claim to it, so Xu would have to test the waters with the various powers to see what the reception to such a claim would be. Plus, there they would have to work nighttime because of the nature of the sinkhole at that particular site, and that was bound to be more dangerous. Better to try and get a handle on what they were dealing with in the Kashkabald first.

"Oh, this is _high_ Centran," said Nida, almost breathless with glee as he studied the photos.

Xu had no idea if this was supposed to have some kind of relevance for her. She raised an eyebrow. Nida didn't pick up on the question therein. He just stood and saluted and rushed out of the office, clutching the photos to his chest like they were precious. Which, she supposed, they were. To him.

As long as his work was good and he didn't jeopardize anyone's safety, she would tolerate him. She wasn't unfair. The Trepies aside (and, honestly, if you joined Garden to get a look at Quistis's tits and not to do your Hyne-damned job, Xu had zero pity for you), Xu rarely let her personal dislike color her assessment of SeeDs and cadets. She didn't like a whole lot of people, sure. But there had really only been a handful of people at Garden that she'd hated; and she liked to imagine that even then she could have been magnanimous, given the right circumstances, such as their profusely apologizing to her, and also begging and humiliating themselves and also surrendering all claim to their undeserved positions on the Disciplinary Committee.

She was flexible. She was no Squall Leonhart. She could bend and work with others. And people might make the mistake of thinking she worked for Squall, on his behalf, but she didn't. She worked for Garden. And she worked with whoever she had to work with.

Even if they occasionally brought unwanted attention to the place. Which some of them did. Had, for the past few months.

After Nida had gone, Xu surveyed the week's news. This was a thing she did sometimes. Usually when Garden's crop of Ultimecia-defying heroes weren't around. Like right now.

They were all good SeeDs. She reminded herself of this. Again. Over and over again. They were all good SeeDs, even if Squall was unstable and also apparently **Addicted to Performance-Enhancing Substances?** Yes. Hyne. Of course. The substances were called GFs. Next.

Rinoa (she collected Rinoa's because she had to keep abreast of sorceress info, not because Rinoa was in any way a SeeD) was still the greatest danger known to man. Xu was aware. She had a good few people working on how to detain and kill Rinoa should Rinoa ever go crazy and make a move against Garden. But she didn't think this outcome was likely, because Rinoa was already pretty crazy, and mostly it came out in stupid campaigns like Save The Ruby Dragons. Next.

Selphie Tilmitt was still apparently grieving, so wasted away by the attack on Trabia that she couldn't get out of bed. Xu had to wonder if these people had ever met Selphie Tilmitt. Next.

Quistis's parents. They'd gone from ignoring and belittling their daughter to becoming hyper-Trepies. They were awful, awful people. The actual Trepies kept inviting them into Garden; this was why the actual Trepies had to go. Supporting people like that, complete leeches, grandstanding jerks who sucked the life out of someone they were supposed to love, hit Xu the wrong way. Cid used to tell her that she was allowed to make one dumb judgment call a month if she did her job well the rest of the time. This was hers. Screw the Trepies, and also the Trepes. Next.

Irvine Kinneas sleeping with people again. Hyne the Profane, couldn't these people find anything new to write about? She knew more about Irvine Kinneas's sex life than was necessary, far far more than she'd ever wanted to know. Now she knew that—

Huh. Xu flipped to the five page spread in the middle of the magazine.

"Hyne the Divine," she actually said out loud. Then she opened up her Garden mail and dashed off a note to Kadowaki.

**Re: SeeD Kinneas  
**Kinneas will need a psychological evaluation as soon as he comes in, counseling for at least three months. Ref. to legal for contacts if he expresses interest in a suit and would be better for his mental health, but it will not be backed by Garden, would be individual matter, make that clear. Pass him on the eval at all counts, administer blind, send actual results to me.  
Xu

She put the magazine on her desk. She hadn't realized she'd dropped it on her lap at first. She had. And she almost didn't want to touch it. She wanted to throw it away. She didn't. She put it in the file she was devoting expressly to monitoring these things.

Something in the back of her mind reminded her to dash off a second email, this time about psych evals for the Trepies. She did this mechanically, almost without thinking about it. She was thinking about bigger things. Garden.

Garden did not have a sterling reputation everywhere. Plenty of ordinary households across the Galbadia continent and even in their own Balamb backyard disliked them. They were considered a disruptive, disloyal, warmongering bunch. And Garden didn't just upend the status quo on an international scale. It also funneled money into the pockets of people who didn't have any before. Gave skills and a start in life to kids who otherwise would have died at 17, as part of the Galbadian war machine or else executed for being young and angry and defiant in Timber or Dollet. This budding, unpatriotic Garden nouveau riche (though really it was more like a comfortable Garden middle class; not that many people hit the really high SeeD ranks and got the big gil) didn't sit well with some people.

And yet the place also had its staunch supporters. Some people adored it for exactly the same reasons others hated it. Children across the continents dreamed of coming here and making SeeD, making something of themselves. Because of those children, Garden had gained prestige over the years. Not as much as it deserved. But enough to get by. And, even if in some corners it was still plebeian, unromantic, honorless, and tacky; lately it had taken a sharp rise in status, what with their defeat of Ultimecia.

And now it was taking a nosedive again. Xu could almost kick herself for not foreseeing it. A bunch of weird, mostly-unhappy orphans who didn't know how _not_ to be taken advantage of to some extent – how were they supposed to live up to the heroic ideals of every nation in the world? Or for that matter any nation in the world? They couldn't. They just couldn't.

Garden kids were soldiers and fighters, yes. But many of them were not cut out to be worshipped. Any hero worship that rolled in for them would come up against their rampant memory loss, a great deal of parental abandonment, no shortage of insecurity…

At some point, the worship would turn to revulsion. You'd get stuff like this. Xu was no great friend to Irvine Kinneas, but she felt for him, on some level. The world had him in its sights, and it wanted to shoot, because people living in staid Dollet, in ravaged Timber, in oppressive Deling City, in destroyed Trabia – they liked a good character assassination. It distracted them from how small and terrible their own lives might get.

Xu decided to call in on the Deling City mission. She usually let her field SeeDs be for a good twenty-four hours before checking in; Cid had almost never checked in, and Garden had been none the worse for it most of the time, so it wasn't like there was any reason for her to do it beyond the fact that she was a slight control freak. Only now there was a reason. In addition to wanting a status update on the mission, Xu wanted to know if Irvine had seen this. And perhaps had a mental breakdown.

She buzzed Selphie, who was senior to Irvine by about two weeks and also one rank above him, which put her in command in every respect even though Xu hadn't assigned command, because their group tended to just ignore her and sort it out between themselves whenever Squall wasn't there to boss them around. Selphie answered right away.

"Oh, Xu," Selphie said. "You are not going to like this. See... Well. First we went to Caraway, fed him a story. And then-"

And then Selphie explained. And no, Xu did not like it.


	7. Chapter 7

What had happened first: they'd gone to a small and overcrowded café, a bustling place with mirrored walls and golden hangings and waiters in stiff collars. Rinoa had wrapped a bright scarf around her head and obtained some sunglasses, which for some reason were the It fashion accessory in Deling City. Had been for a long time. Probably because they were expensive here, since they were manufactured mostly in sunny places like Winhill and imported in, but also because they were completely unnecessary given the constant Deling City nighttime. It was still morning here, and it was still night. Sunglasses? Useless here.

Deling City being what it was, a girl like Rinoa could be expected to own at least fifteen totally superfluous pairs of sunglasses. She had given Selphie a neon green pair and Irvine some sleek wraparounds. They looked the ultimate in Deling hipster chic.

Rinoa took incognito very seriously, since she was by the now the most easily recognizable face on the planet. But she was very fair-minded about it. Irvine and Selphie had told her they wouldn't mind if she wanted to use her powers, go invisible. But to her this remained unthinkable. If even one of her friends were risking potential discovery by the press, or by a SeeD-hating contingent of the Galbadian army? Then Rinoa, too, would undergo the risks. It was only fair.

So instead of invisibility, Rinoa had invoked her Middle Trabian spell. They wanted to talk without being overheard, but she didn't know a spell to make them inaudible to all but each other. So Selphie had suggested trying to recreate the strange fluke that had infected them all two months ago and left them perfectly able to speak and understand an unknown dead language. It worked.

Selphie loved this spell. She loved the strange, wonderful sense of suddenly thinking differently. Boom! There went your brain. And now you had a new one. You suddenly had highly specific words for some very odd concepts: the sensation of leaving your body behind and becoming one with Hyne's magic, for example. The nostalgia one had for the eternal connectivity of all beings that had existed when the world was young. The ability to exist without contemplating past or future.

It was obviously not Middle Trabian. They just pretended it was, so that Rinoa wouldn't become upset. Because the language was somewhat heavy on the ks. It put one in mind of Ultimecia.

It was sorceress-speech.

Oddly, Selphie's GFs loved it too. Ifrit and Doomtrain perked right up as soon as Rinoa performed the spell. And Irvine went quiet, a little stunned, like Siren was doing the same. Probably Rinoa's Alexander and Leviathan liked it also. But Rinoa said nothing to indicate this. Instead she got right down to listing everyone she knew who'd been in the library at the time she'd sensed magic use. It read like a who's who of Deling City's elite. These were people whose very names seemed more genteel, more beautiful, fell more sweetly on the ear than just about everybody else's. Alkonet, Baymoss, Spaiss, Hyssop, Capsicalle, Selinum, Ruta, Betel, Calaminth.

There were first names in there, too, but the surnames were more interesting, because they corresponded to Deling's Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Interim Commissioner, the Treasurer-Appointee, and so on. Where they didn't, Rinoa would often put in that such and such was related to some bigshot on the patrilineal. Spaiss's father was Secretary of the Interior. Ruta's, the head of the Cultural Affairs Cabinet. Selinum and Calaminth's, actual genuine honest-to-Hyne Delings, so it was safe to say that whatever their official jobs were, they commanded far more power than anyone else would have in the same positions.

"Alright," Selphie said, once they had the list in front of them. "Put down the library staff as well."

"Oh! I didn't even think of them," Rinoa said. She put those names down too. In faux Middle Trabian, so that to everyone but them the writing looked like strange blocky doodles, not actual writing at all.

"We should get them out of the way first," Selphie told her. "They could tell us if anyone else was there that day. And it would be better if it were the staff, right? For us. If it's one of your classmates, then we have a problem. Because if they're violating the agreement then either we have to break it to some Deling bigshot that their kid is ignoring international law, or else the Deling bigshot already knows and is in on it."

That latter option wasn't impossible. Just messy and horrible and a political nightmare. A situation tailor-made for SeeD, really. But they wouldn't jump straight to that. They'd eliminate the easier suspects first. Go slow about it. Methodical. Careful. Calm and cool the whole way through. Not Selphie's preferred method of operating. She liked explosions and danger. But Xu had told them to keep this low-profile.

"We'll sneak into the library!" Rinoa said. "Lock up the staff and hijack the computers. Get the staff names that way – they won't give them up if they recognize us – and see the access pass data list. You guys can do that. You have the training, right?"

Wow. Assaulting librarians? Not low-profile.

"We do have the training," Selphie said. Then, a little sadly, "We also have the training to just ask."

"And I know enough about Gryphon," Irvine added, somewhat mysteriously, "That I think we'll be able to get the information we need right away."

Rinoa blinked at them both.

It seemed to Selphie that sometimes Rinoa forgot that, just because SeeD could theoretically topple whole governments and carry out assassinations and hack into every data system save Esthar's, that didn't mean SeeD always would. Stuff like that was often more trouble than it was worth. If they got really flashy about it, started going around advertising everything they could do, then they became even more provoking and threatening to the world order than they already were. And then who knew what they'd have to defend against? Galbadia would attack Garden straight out if they thought SeeD posed as much of a threat as SeeD really did. Deling City strategists were not known for holding back militarily, even if at present they were hobbled by recent world events.

The only reason they'd held back so far, as far as Selphie could tell, was because for some people Garden had nothing to do with defeating Ultimecia. The papers still treated Garden like a fancy charity school, and less like a military powerhouse. Credit for any recent derring-do went not to the organization as a whole, but simply to the new orphanage gang, in slightly uneven shares. 50% or more to Squall. 40% spread out irregularly among his support team: Irvine, Selphie, Zell, and Quistis. And then about 10% to the new sorceress, who was expected to have gained her powers by toppling the old sorceress anyway, because sorceresses, everyone knew, did not play nice and were inherently threatening and would always be a problem.

But as long as it looked like SeeD was containing Rinoa (which, it had finally come out, was the whole point of SeeD in any case: to take the problem of the sorceress out of nice people's hands), like they were just a bunch of unruly babysitters sacrificed to the world's greatest magical threat, then the public would tolerate Garden.

And just as she'd given Caraway exactly that impression, so too did Selphie give it to the librarian at the Gryphon Library.

"We would appreciate your help," she said, leaning over the front desk so far that she was basically balancing on her hands, her feet dangling back over the edge. The librarian blinked. "We believe a threat against Rinoa may be coming in from G-Garden, and that someone may have trailed her here a week ago. Could you possibly check the access past list for us? Just to make sure there's nothing suspicious."

Rinoa's librarian was the opposite of their warm, smiling Library Girl back at Garden. He was an insectile, praying-mantis-like creature; the kind of person you could imagine being crushed by accident between the pages of a book and then trapped there, flattened and skinny, for all eternity, until only a bloody imprint on the pages remained. Tall and spindly, wire-frame glasses, indeterminate age. Rinoa's magic sensing power had written him off as their mystery caster; Selphie had questioned him obliquely about different kinds of magic and agreed that this was a sound conclusion. But he was still useful; he could give them a more complete picture of who else had been there that day. He blinked, looked unhappy to find Selphie so close all of a sudden, and said, "I can assure you that the kinds of persons who enroll at G-Garden never set foot on the Gryphon campus—"

"I have. Three floors, two wings," Irvine said.

"I—I beg your pardon?" said the librarian. He regarded Irvine with the same upper-crusty disdain Caraway had, only there was a slight tinge of fascinated horror as well.

Possibly he read the gossip rags.

Selphie became annoyed at this and propelled herself forward a little more, until she was centimeters from his nose. The librarian grimaced. Her wrists protested, but not by much; she didn't weigh much and they could support her weight for a little bit more, plus this was for a good cause. Namely, freaking out an asshole who clearly thought he was better than her boyfriend.

She also took a minute to remind herself that while she was here in Deling she should remember to murder Rill Tremlett.

"Two wings of stacks on three floors," Irvine was saying, "A star-ceiling reading room on the top floor, twenty-four individual study rooms in the back of the building, newspaper archives in the basement, school archives in the attic, private lecture hall with Estharian jade-inset fireplace donated by Vinzer Deling after the war with Adel, six computer rooms, reading garden with statues of famous alums, this really big staircase," here he extended a hand at the massive spiral staircase just behind the desk, "And a hidden back staircase that connects to a tunnel underneath the basement that then connects to the rest of the campus buildings."

"She told you that!" said the librarian, pointing an accusing finger at Rinoa.

"No," Rinoa said, stunned. "I didn't, actually."

"We'd get farmed out to do bodyguard duty for these kids sometimes," Irvine said, shrugging. "We're younger and better looking than soldiers, we all learn how to drive at age twelve, we can research and pre-plan routes better than any ordinary citizen, we'd keep our mouths shut about everything we found out or else Martine would have our hides for betraying client secrets; and, hey. Sometimes we'd even sit exams or write papers so they didn't have to."

The long, thin mantis face went red. "A Gryphon student would never cheat—"

"No, they really would," Rinoa said. "What exams did you sit?"

"Introduction to Para-magic," said Irvine. "Plus a few governance seminars. And I turned in a paper on the theory behind Guardian Forces once; that was fun. I got to raid your resources on GFs. We didn't have nearly as many at G-Garden. My client just gave me his access pass so I could get in here to do it. And the funny thing is, it had a photo on it. But as long as I looked like I belonged here, this guy here never once checked to make sure the photo was mine."

"That's right. It must have been you," said Rinoa, pointing at the librarian. "You've been here since I started going here."

Sputtering from the librarian. Crazy sputtering. The mantis face got so red that Selphie hopped off the desk, because possibly this guy's head would explode, and while she had a dark intellectual curiosity that made her want to see that happen, she didn't particularly want to be in the way of the blood splatter.

Irvine nodded. "You were the one whose job it was to make sure I matched the ID being swiped. In fact, I remember you pretty well. I could probably testify to it being you."

"And I have to wonder," Selphie finished, "What people like General Caraway and Minister Alkonet and Secretary Spaiss would think, if they found out you were letting just anyone into their kids' private playground?"

They had him cornered.

"We're gonna need that access pass list," Selphie said. "Even though I'm pretty sure it's not gonna be that helpful. What with you not doing your job and all…"

The librarian scowled. He retreated to his computer and printed the list.

"Thank you!" Selphie said brightly, once she had it in her hand.

They turned to go. Irvine gave a polite tip of his cap to the librarian, which was somewhat undermined by the fact that they'd just shaken the guy down, orphanage-gang style. Rinoa, Selphie reflected, was really getting the hang of being a member of the orphanage gang. She would never be a SeeD – that was raw power and military precision. But being a member of the orphanage gang was just as good, because that was trusting your teammates' instincts, having their backs at all costs, and bullshitting like a pro if it came down to that.

"Hey," Selphie whispered, putting a hand on her back. "Nice work."

Rinoa said, "Thanks, Selph—"

Then she stopped. Just stopped at the foot of the library's massive spiral staircase, right underneath the big, glorious, Dolletian glass monstrosity of a chandelier. Her whole demeanor changed. Her face looked worried. Irvine and Selphie stopped too, to see what was wrong with her, and in that instant someone else came in through the wide double doors in front of them and said, "Rinoa!"

It was a girl.

She italicized 'Rinoa' when she said it. Selphie could hear her doing it. It was in her ultra-genteel voice. Not just Rinoa's regular name, but Rinoa's name said with patrician significance, almost over-enunciated. Rinoa herself did this sometimes when she talked, but she seemed to have trained herself out of the practice overall. It only came up to emphasize points that Rinoa felt more morally grey, more callous minds might gloss over. This girl did it as a matter of course. Like she had been taught that any word she chanced to utter might be so important that she had to emphasize it.

She was tall, nearly six feet. Athletic, broad-shouldered, but with a slim frame in that way Galbadians liked. Her hair was fair, like that of an old Dolletian princess or an Estharian lady warlord, her eyes an indeterminate pale grey. Her face could only be Galbadian, like Rinoa's, but she didn't have the odd delicacy about the mouth, or the uncommon warmth about the eyes. So without her height and coloring she would have been no great beauty. Deling City shop owners and hoteliers had those same features arranged in basically the same way.

"Oh, Missy," Rinoa said, blinking. "Listen, we're kind of busy—"

"Rinoa, you're back! I'm so glad! And who is this? It the Commander here, too? He seemed like such a nice boy, nothing like what the papers say—"

"No, no," Rinoa said, "Listen, Missy, I— We—"

Missy looked once to Irvine, once to Selphie, and settled on Selphie. Specifically, she put her hand on Selphie's arm, with a kind of odd fluid kindness. Selphie suspected she should find the action overly-familiar, but she couldn't, because Missy seemed very aware of their height differences, and stooped a little to make up for it, and smiled. And while she seemed wary of Irvine, she still grinned at him and said, "Oh, it's so nice that you've brought along a Galbadian this time. You know I was dying to meet him. And you, Selphie Tilmitt of Trabia. I think you're sostrong."

Incognito or not, Missy had apparently identified Irvine right away, and had probably put together who Selphie was. So much for low profile.

With the hand that was not holding Selphie's arm captive, Missy reached into her bag for her access pass. Her thumb covered the first part, but Selphie caught her surname: Spaiss, which made her a Deling heiress on the middling to high level, with not one but two genuine Secretarial parents. She also caught Missy's middle name, Abcynthia, which indicated that these parents were stunningly cruel people.

She said, "Rinoa, I'm so glad you've come by, because I thought I was all alone, and, you know, there's nobody here today. Everybody in class A is going out tonight, and I'm the only one still doing the silly governance paper because I was transferred in after you left, so I'm always behind, and—"

"How do you know they're not already here?" Rinoa said suddenly, apropos of nothing.

Selphie approved of this question; they had to figure out where some of these people were if they were going to question them later on.

"They've all messaged to tell me," Missy said, dropping her pass in her bag and fishing out a vidphone instead (high end, one of these new ones that took advantage of the increase in planetary radio function, but backwards compared to the perfected Estharian model). She held it up, like Rinoa could peer through and read all her messages automatically. Which was something that, Rinoa being a sorceress, Missy probably assumed Rinoa could actually do.

After a minute of Rinoa not doing this, but instead just staring at Missy with a kind of puzzled look, Missy passed her the phone. Then she said, very seriously, "I wanted to talk to you anyway."

"That's nice," Rinoa said. She sounded uncharacteristically short. Not herself at all. "Listen, I have to do something. You can call me later."

This was not good SeeD thinking. If you had to question someone, and they practically opened themselves up to you, then you let it happen. Good SeeDs didn't spit on the blessings of Hyne and all that. Rinoa was learning how to conduct herself like a SeeD, but she still wasn't quite there. So Selphie overrode her. Selphie said, "Actually, Missy, we were wonderi—"

"I don't have your number!" Missy insisted.

"Pretty sure Caraway's stuck it in the directory," said Rinoa.

But then, apropos of nothing, Missy said, "You don't have to be afraid of being a sorceress, Rinoa."

Rinoa blinked. Selphie blinked. Even Irvine, slouching against a column, straightened up and shot them both a weird look, blinking. This had come out of nowhere. It was unusual, strangely direct for someone who had probably grown up surrounded by Deling City double-speak. And it was said in an oddly bland and honest way, with no verbal italics that Selphie could detect. And it was beautifully perceptive – it cut right at the heart of what Rinoa was dealing with there days. Squall had indicated that he felt Rinoa's Deling friends were all barbed speech and ugly gossip, not real friends at all, not that he was any kind of expert on the topic. But maybe he'd been wrong.

"I mean," Missy continued, seeming uncomfortable, "When you were here. Everyone kept bringing up Adel and all that. And that awful other one. Edea—"

"Ultimecia," Irvine corrected. "Edea's not a sorceress anymore, actually, and she's—"

"Responsible for the death of our president," said Missy, waving one long-fingered hand. "But that's obviously not you, Rinoa. Those women were irrational, degraded, wild—"

Wow. Unkind words about Matron aside, Missy seemed to be trying for a compliment, maybe? But she seemed to be trying wrong. Reminding Rinoa what sorceresses could turn into was maybe not the best way to go about this.

"I—" Rinoa began.

"You were raised right here with us, in Deling," said Missy. "And we might have had our differences of opinion, but honestly. You're a good and civilized person. Everyone else knows it, too. They're just like that, you know. They're just trying to bring you down. They've been very very strange since Ruta's sister took up with these silly G-Garden people, all GF talk and—"

Oh, jackpot. Thank you, Missy. Perfect, wonderful, beautiful, exactly what they had come for. Selphie let the Matron talk drop (and, anyway, she was somewhat cold on Matron herself; yes, it was Matron, but then there was the ruin of Trabia to consider). Selphie could have hugged Missy.

"What was that, Missy?" she said, waggling her fingers in front of Missy's face to get her attention.

Missy blinked.

"GF talk," she repeated. "That Headmaster Martine squirreled one or two GFs away, I think? In secret. And Ruta's sister met this G-Garden boy who had one with him, and they're all aflutter with it, because you know none of us uses para-magic. She's probably meeting with him right now. I don't think it's appropriate. Para-magic is so… It's for soldiers. And backroom brawls. I think they're all a little fascinated, though. And jealous of poor Rinoa. Some girls would die to be a sorceress. It's so odd. I mean, it's one thing to meet up with a Garden type and, and…"

Missy trailed off, as if suddenly aware that she was speaking to two Garden types.

"…go slumming?" Irvine suggested. "It's fine. Tell us about the GFs."

"Yes," Rinoa said, oddly urgent. This was the thing about non-SeeDs. Sometimes they couldn't keep their cool. "But I think we should maybe go—"

Go? That made no sense. Missy was proving to be a valuable informant. They should stay, more like, and see what else they could get out of her.

"About Ruta's sister," Selphie said to Missy, talking over Rinoa. "Was she here last week when Rinoa came by?"

"Oh, she's always here," Missy said.

"Like right now!" Rinoa said. "Maybe she's here right now!"

"No, no," said Missy. She brought her phone out again. This time she bothered to actually show them the messages. One, from a Tulip Ruta, simply stated:_ can't study today, with my hon Yyl Majesdane. ;)_

"That's probably the G-Garden cadet," Missy said disgustedly.

"Okay," Rinoa said. "Fine. We know its Tulip."

Irvine and Selphie stared at her. This was coming perilously close to giving up the game, suggesting to Missy that they were here for a reason, letting anyone know that they were here to do more than investigate G-Garden.

"The thing is—" Rinoa said.

"Where's yyiiil whatever?" Selphie said, speaking over her again. "This place they're supposed to be at? See, the funny thing is, Missy, we heard that there were some threats against Rinoa coming out of G-Garden."

"And if we could talk to Tulip's cadet that might orient us," Irvine put in. "Sounds like he's not big on the establishment there."

"Of course," Missy said, brightening. "I'd love to help—"

"Guys," Rinoa said, desperate and not at all subtle. She was distressed enough that she made Missy stop short, stop helping. Instead, Missy put a concerned hand on her arm.

Irvine stared at Rinoa. Selphie stared at Rinoa. Never before had it been alarmingly clear that Rinoa had been raised a slightly clingy Galbadian heiress and not, in fact, a SeeD. She was carelessly throwing them off their lead, just after Missy had so helpfully dropped it in their laps.

Irvine shook his head slightly, warningly. Selphie mouthed: _Rinoa. Not now._

In response, Rinoa erupted into a hail of feathers. And vanished.

* * *

It occurred to Irvine that maybe sometimes sorceress magic could go haywire. And that if and when it did, the sensible thing would be for the sorceress to try and warn her friends.

He could see the exact same thought occurring to Selphie at the exact same time. Specifically, several milliseconds too late. Rinoa had already been replaced by feathers.

_A poor friend you both make! _Siren snorted.

"Shut up," Irvine thought at her. "You don't have friends, period. What d'you know?"

As soon as he thought that, it occurred to him that he hadn't had friends, period, until he'd met Rinoa and reconnected with the rest of them. And so Siren thought the same thing, and became just a touch more smug, which was really unwarranted; she was smug enough as she was.

Missy cleared her throat. She looked appalled. She was a good looking girl (a bit wary around Irvine, but who wasn't, with what people were printing about him these days?), if not quite on Selphie's level, and she'd been kind to Rinoa, so whatever Irvine thought about her school or the kinds of people she probably hung out with, he put it aside.

"It's—" he began, as calmly as he could, "It's alright."

Was it?

Was Rinoa alright?

So her powers were acting up. She'd gone invisible, probably against her will. That was all. She was still there, right?

_Or something terrible has happened to her,_ put in Siren, echoing his thoughts.

There was a crash behind them. Irvine whirled around. Some unseen force had knocked a pile of books from the librarian's desk onto the floor. The librarian looked affronted. Missy looked even more startled than she had before. They were so focused on the books that they completely missed seeing one of the white feathers blanketing the floor suddenly drift up and smack Irvine squarely on the nose, three times.

Then, for good measure, it tangled itself in Selphie's hair.

Rinoa was still with them. Just invisible.

"She's teleported," Selphie said suddenly.

Selphie had a remarkable tendency to pull complete lies out of thin air when called upon to explain away difficult situations. It wasn't anything SeeD had ever taught her to do. It was just who she was. As a child, she'd been much the same, stealing Zell's toys, putting glue in Quistis's ponytail, tying Squall's shoelaces together, appropriating Sis's dolls, locking Seifer in the beach shed, and then, innocently, concocting very elaborate fabrications that Matron hadn't really believed, of course not, except that half the time she had. Selphie was about as restrained and understated as Zell was, as a Behemoth crashing into your back was. Often she was clumsy and she didn't think things through, and she had an intense preference for violent means when understated stealth would have served just as well. But the girl had a fairly good track record with the bald-faced lie.

Particularly since Irvine always backed her up on it. What could he say? He wanted to see her succeed.

"We're actually investigating a report that some of the dissatisfaction in G-Garden might be boiling over into outright sorceress hate," Irvine said, pulling from Selphie's earlier lie to Caraway.

"We told her that if it turned out there really was magic involved, she should teleport right away!" Selphie said. "Yep! That's what we said!"

"Good thing she remembered and took us up on it," said Irvine.

"She's the best," said Selphie.

"Follows orders like you can't believe," said Irvine.

"What a trooper," Selphie said. "So sorry that sometimes we forget that."

"We really don't give her enough credit," Irvine said.

There was a brief, sudden hrrrmph from near Irvine's ear.

"You must take terribly good care of her," said Missy. "I'm so glad SeeD exists to control the sorceress power. Imagine poor Rinoa without you."

Another hmph, this time louder.

"Did you say something?" Missy said to Irvine.

"Just clearing my throat," Irvine said. "Listen, Missy, about your friend. Tulip Ruta? Like Selphie was saying. Can you tell us where exactly she and this cadet of hers might be? I might even know him, so if we can get him to talk straight—"

"Tell you? I can show you! You're so good to Rinoa; it's the least I could do for a friend of a friend!"

Irvine held a hand out towards the door.

"Lead the way," he said gallantly.

But as they walked away, there was a brief tug at his arm.

"I'm staying," came Rinoa's voice, hissed and low, from somewhere just behind him.

Irvine whirled around to where he thought she was. What? he mouthed in her general direction. The librarian, scowling and looking miserable, either because he'd had to deal with SeeDs or because someone had just become feathers with no warning in the middle of his library, or else because of the scattered books on the floor (it was not this guy's day), saw Irvine do this.

"You should really pick those up," Irvine told him hurriedly, tipping his cap. Then he turned his attention back to trying to communicate with the air where Rinoa maybe was standing at the moment.

"I have to do something here," Rinoa whispered. "Meet me back at Caraway's. I think the problem is bigger than we think it is!"

Before Irvine could figure out how to communicate with an invisible person without looking completely crazy, there was a brief shifting of the feathers on the floor, as though Rinoa were passing over them as she walked away. Then the ID pass-scanning machine at the base of the stairs rattled, like someone was climbing over it with no care for the damage they might do. Then he thought he heard, faintly, the kinds of footsteps a hundred-pounds-wet girl might make as she ran up the stairs.

Away from her friends.

In the middle of a mission.

"What in Hyne's patootie…?" Selphie muttered, at his elbow.

She'd put it together, too. Whatever was wrong with Rinoa? Had made her run away from them. Which wasn't very Rinoa-like. Rinoa did not abandon ship; it wasn't her nature. Rinoa did not run off from her friends; she took friendship seriously.

On the other hand, it wasn't like anyone could accuse Rinoa of not being overconfident and harebrained.

_Remember that time she kicked you down a flight of stairs,_ Siren put in.

"'Course I do," Irvine thought. "I just thought of it. That's why you can think of it."

_Can I have that?_ Siren said. _Good times. From my perspective. Not yours._

"Are we going?" Missy said, having completely missed Irvine and Selphie's baffling exchange with the Invisible Girl. "I do have a paper to write, but I'd much rather help dear Rin out, because—"

Irvine put Siren out of his mind. Er. Hypothetically.

"As loyal as you are beautiful," he told Missy.

"We can take my car," Missy said, looking prim and flattered.

Selphie rolled her eyes.

"Fine. Let's go," she said. "We can…collect our things at Caraway's—"

Irvine said, "Our malfunctioning—"

Selphie said, "Slightly puzzling, wayward—"

They finished together, "Things."

Rinoa.

"After we've sorted this out," Selphie added. "Mission always takes priority."

"How very military," Missy said mildly. It was hard to tell if she approved. But then she was giving them a ride, so Irvine figured her hesitancy around SeeD could be forgiven. It was not standard SeeD procedure to take rides from strange tall heiresses. In the first place, girls like that didn't come around often. In the second, you never knew if 'ride' could be code for 'trapping you in a confined Galbadian military vehicle and shooting you like a dog.' But Missy's car couldn't have trapped them. It wasn't built for trapping. It was built for showing off.

It was an F-type Thrustaevis, sleek and shining and silver-blue, all modern lines, designed after the Dec Arto movement that was in vogue in Deling City right now. After the functionality and solid ugliness of Garden transports, it looked like some grandiose drug hallucination on wheels. Irvine was not a car man by any means – he had too many vices to add another, more expensive one to the list – but this thing would have their humble Balamb mechanic back home paying Missy just for the chance to work on it. To touch it, even.

The inside was so clean and spotless and beautiful that one could have mistaken Missy for a Garden kid, raised into impersonal military precision in all things. There were no small touches, nothing special or unique to reveal Missy's character or interests. There weren't even the obligatory fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror.

"It's new," Missy said. "I only just received my permits from the Commissioner."

After Ultimecia's takeover, to drive in Deling City on a full-time basis you had to pass fifteen tests, including a full background check and a blood test and a test of patriotism. These cost, on average, sixteen hundred gil paid out to the state. The car needed to be registered and insured by the Deling Insurance Co., equipped with trackers to be activated in case of suspicious activity, and it was, per the law, partially owned by the government, who could seize it at any time, for any reason. Officials and heiresses made up the bulk of the city's drivers. The Car Rental had shut down. The bus now checked ID.

Deling was now a city of pedestrians, for the most part.

Selphie, who'd snagged the front seat, was saying, "Now, give us the layout of yyill…"

"Majesdane," Missy said, "Of course."

She outlined what she knew about the place. Irvine committed it to memory, interjecting where he thought he could add some useful fact about the G-Hotel district, and mentally shooed Siren away from the information he was taking in. When Missy had told them all she could, she and Selphie lapsed into a friendly discussion about fashions in Trabia versus fashions in Deling. Irvine would have been an able participant, but for the fact that Selphie had sent him a baleful look over his earlier flirtations, so he mostly kept quiet and stared out of the window for the duration of the ride.

His Garden papers listed Deling City as his hometown. It wasn't, not really. He'd been shuffled from the orphanage to Deling to G-Garden in the span of six years, and yes, most of that time had been spent in what was, on paper, Deling City. But it wasn't Deling City. Not really. It was the Southeast outskirts. That was very different. Blocky, military construction. Miles of garbage dumps and factories and timber-cutting yards, a nameless industrial zone crossed with rail tracks and highways, army vehicles clanking by every hour on the hour, taking parents to the missile site or a training ground, down into the desert for their job at the prison, across to the coasts to serve patrol in the unlikely event that Esthar woke up again someday and attacked from the West.

North of Deling was less polluted, more beautiful, but so overgrown with monsters as to be uninhabitable. In the days of Holy Dolletian supremacy, it had been peopled by the Acenath, an empire that far predated even Dollet's, that had once waged war with the Centrans. The Acenath had possessed a glorious flourishing nation that reached down into where Deling was today. Accordingly, they had some descendants among modern Galbadians, darker-skinned than the rest, with beautiful names like Mosshill or Skyfin, Seagill or Wingflower. But they had angered a sorceress coming out of Dollet, the all-powerful Domitia, whose knight had been one of the most bloodthirsty high dukes of the Dolletian empire. In short time, they'd fallen. Their cities had disappeared overnight, been left barren and empty of people. And it was said that their lands were cursed, now and forevermore. Their last ancient king's name had been struck from the history books; his tomb laid to ruin. And the surviving Acenath became Dolletian.

So too had, over time, the Safra of the desert, the Nah warlords of the midlands, the Kalevan of the Northern peninsula, the Brais who'd once dotted the land near Winhill, and the old Timberi foresters and frontiersmen. Until it made no sense to call the empire Dolletian. Domitia and her knight had consumed the continent. Their realm, though it would eventually break back into scattered city-states, could only be called Galbadian.

And the vast industrial suburban stretches between Deling and the rest of the continent were, to Irvine's mind, the most Galbadian of Galbadian places. Useful. Functional. Ugly. It was where the great machine of the Galbadian army lay, spaced out and separate from ordinary citizens, but always just a day's ride away. Where Vinzer Deling's secrets and worst abuses were buried, alongside valleys of soot-blackened trees and red deserts stained by cheap car oil and para-magic effluence. Irvine had grown up there, but you didn't really grow at all there. Nothing grew. Moving forward in any way was a choking process, gasping for air among the smog and the banging, intrusive activities of the army, ignoring the results of military orders and basic facts and all facets of smothering reality. The people living there – some seventy-five percent of Vinzer Deling's subjects – went to work for the army, scraping by a kind of existence. And then, to live, they pretended they weren't Galbadian at all. They reached out, desperate, for some clear spot of fresh air and freedom in any small way they could: old books, pretty faces, fantasies of old Dolletian cowboys living free among the Safra in the desert, religious ecstasy, sex.

Galbadia was not a happy place. Irvine had willingly traded away a million memories of it. And held on, anxiously, to the clean orphanage, to the wide and endless Centran beaches he'd played on, to the little girl who'd pushed him into tide pools only to rescue him from the sea crabs minutes later.

Unlike people unlucky enough to be born in Galbadia, Irvine had roots elsewhere. Far away, in someplace Deling City couldn't touch. In this way, he could understand Rinoa's love for Timber. Timber might be humble, might be poor. It didn't have the glamour Deling City did, nor did Edea's orphanage. But neither did it have the banal ugliness, and neither was it stifling.

"Though to be fair," Irvine thought, as they crossed the bridge out of the mansion district, "You'd never know how horrible it can be to be Galbadian if you go by Deling City."

_It's actually pretty here,_ said Siren.

"And fake," Irvine thought.

Deling City was the front, the cover, a star on a grat shit pile, blinding you with its brightness so that you couldn't see what lay underneath. It was an architectural and artistic marvel: a mélange of all the different kingdoms Vinzer Deling's distant ancestor and his sorceress had conquered. Old Dolletian castles, mansions paneled in glossy imported Timberi mahogany, beautiful apartment complexes with courtyards and fountains in the style of the old desert palaces, high iron gates with the impressive pyramid-symbols of the Acenath, parks studded with shining cobbles mined near Winhill. Not to mention neon from the outskirts, antique green glass blown by Nah descendants out in Dollet, and beautiful squares and townhouses designed by the Timber's infamous and famously artistic betrayer, Baron Shasnamun.

It was a jewel of a town. Even the smog of the outskirts seemed to collect around it in such a way as to offer the city not a cover of hideous, polluted clouds, but a kind of sublime eternal night. Cyrel Leyephs, poetical nephew to Ursula Deling II, had claimed it was not smog at all, once you reached Deling City. Instead the nighttime here was a living thing, a breathing monster, a Guardian Force whose eternal task was to protect the sacred heart of the new Galbadian empire. A pretty thought. A nice image to drop, on a dark Deling evening, when you were walking some cute girl upstairs to her room at the G-hotel, and wanted to impress her.

But it was smog. Just like the reality of Galbadia was miles and miles of misery between here, Timber, and Dollet. So too was the reality of the poetical nighttime simply, unmistakably, smog.

"It's so glamorous here," Selphie was saying, as they passed the presidential palace. "In Trabia we don't have castles, or—"

"The interior was modeled on the original Dolletian imperial palace," noted Missy.

"I don't remember seeing anything like that in Dollet," Selphie said.

Irvine cut in. "'Cause of Catkin's Men, Selphie."

Selphie turned around, stared, raised an eyebrow at him.

"Catkin's men?" she said.

"You mean you don't know?" said Missy, aghast. "Don't they teach you any Galbadian history in Trabia?"

_No,_ Siren supplied, drawing on what she'd learned from Irvine. _Probably not. Because it's mostly propaganda._

"No," Selphie said bluntly. "Of course not. Why would we care? We're not Galbadia."

Missy sniffed. But then, evidently, she decided Selphie ought to learn the story anyway. It was an important story.

Or at least that was the party line.

* * *

Zsinma Catkin, if you went by the Galbanization of her original name, had been Dolletian on her papers, daughter of a Nah glassblower in reality, and descendent of warlords in her mind. In her head, it was said, she'd imagined herself the heir to some grand ancient kingdom. She'd been an upstart like that. Rebellious. Born arrogant.

At age fifteen, she ran away from home and trekked across her people's ravaged ancestral lands (not yet industrialized, but overrun with Galbadian army deserters, no place for anyone to live unmolested) to Deling City. There, she'd taken up the newspaper life. She was no great fan of the government. In those days, this was not a killable offense, merely a jailable one. She served time regularly, a week every month in the Deling City PD's cells, until she was twenty-one. She used the time to write angrier, ever-more-critical articles.

It was the era of Ursula Deling IV. Ursula was a weak Deling. The blood of dukes and sorceresses had gone very thin in her. She was harmless and sweet, but very mad. She lived sequestered in the presidential palace with aides and doctors, issuing raving proclamations that rarely impacted or affected the populace. She feared that the eternal nighttime was not smog, but a sign of Hyne, a curse on the city. Therefore she spent hours locked indoors, surrounded by sun lamps, addicted to brightness. Her government rarely legislated at all; the city was lawless—

_Not the worst it would become,_ put in Siren, silently giving voice to a stray thought that had crept up into Irvine's consciousness as he listened.

-and her brilliant daughter, Vincenza III, was still but a child, unable to control the family's unruly subjects.

Catkin delighted in the chaos in Deling City in this time. She became a byword for dissatisfaction, sowing discord among the gangsters and thugs proliferating on every corner, and criticizing the palace guards at every turn. She had the ear of the common man, and she used it to advocate for the end to their continent-wide alliance. Dollet, Timber, Winhill, the desert, the midlands – all pledged loyalty to Deling City. And why? For what? Deling City, Catkin argued, could not control itself. So it was time to throw off its yoke. There was no use anymore for Galbadia. Better to go back to being their own nations, once and for all.

Now, Catkin's childish anger, her fantastic desire to disrupt the order of the Galbadian Alliance, had some very real supporters. Immigrants to the city of Deling, two-faced hypocrites from Timber and Winhill who could only survive on Deling City's dime, flocked to her. And the unthinking local man, annoyed at his tax dollars being spent for the benefit of these disloyal places, similarly believed her reasoning was sound. Pioneers out in Galbadia's Centran outposts were already halfway to completing her plan, declaring their Deling-funded communities new nations, urging separation from the mother city.

But shortsighted Catkin had never predicted Adel.

Brutal, deformed, uncontrollable, and wicked, the sorceress had torn through the Estharian continent, crushing whole populations that had opposed her. She'd driven the Estharian Shumi to their cousins in Trabia, obliterated tribespeople who'd traded peaceably with Esthar for centuries, and was now making incursions into Centra and even across the oceans, to the Eastern and Southern reaches of the Galbadian continent. Her hunger for power was insatiable, her evil unmatched.

And the only force that could stop her was a united Galbadia.

So callow Catkin was proven wrong. The twilight of the empire was not upon them. Far from it, by some miracle, the good people of Galbadia realized they had to band together. Vincenza III, at the young age of twenty, saw her mother carted off to a care facility, a small sacrifice to make for her people. And then she and her brother Vinzer set about reforming the army, routing out dissident cowards who wouldn't fight, and making plans. For what? The Sorceress War, of course. The Delings were visionaries, and they knew, even before the war had been formally declared, that they had to unite the continent, make of all these squabbling city-states a power that could withstand Adel's magic and superior technology.

Catkin was routed from her newspaper office and offered a chance to do some good, to join the army. But she chose instead to evade her military duty. No great surprise there. She retreated not to Dollet, which was the cultural if not political heart of the empire and therefore a patriotic town. Instead she went to Timber, a place in very real danger because its rail lines stretched across the ocean to Esthar (a throw back to earlier, simpler times, when the Timberi had traded far and wide), and holed up to wait out the war. Her warlord's anger, her fury at Galbadia, had not abated. She took up with a crew of similar-minded folk, newspapermen, and preached Timberi separatism even in the face of Adel.

While a few sensible Timberi understood Adel's threat and cleaved to Galbadia, Catkin sowed discord among the majority. She peppered her newspaper – ostensibly a politically neutral outlet with a focus on travel and the arts – with 'warnings' against Galbadian supremacy and what she felt might happen should Deling City seize control after the war.

_And what no one ever tells us,_ put in Siren_, Is that she wasn't wrong._

To keep the peace, Vinzer Deling, acting for his sister, cracked down on Timber, urging them to see the light and unite with the rest of the continent. And a few did. Timberi soldiers fought against Adel, even if many were conscripted unwillingly, and Timberi blood was shed in Centra and the South just the same as anyone else's. But even then, some Timberi remained bitter. Angry, prideful, stupid. They saw themselves as too good for the rest of the continent. They preferred to ally themselves with wretched, cruel Esthar, those distant cousins of theirs in the thrall of the sorceress, rather than bend the knee even once to greater Galbadia.

These became Catkin's men. A network of backstabbing, honorless Timberi, they fought alongside good, united Galbadians in many a regiment, but all the while they were sending information back to Catkin, and Catkin? Was sending it across the rails to Esthar.

_Her real flaw is that it wouldn't make a difference, in the end. Esthar or Galbadia. Adel or Deling._ said Siren.

"No, she was pretty sure even Adel wouldn't be so bad. What Missy's not saying," Irvine thought, "Or what Missy doesn't know, maybe. Is what Vinzer Deling was doing to Timber, to get those men to fight. It's why he built the damn D-District in the first place, really. To hold their families, and to set up a hostage group, captive Timberi to build his weapons, craft his bombs. "

_…!_

"Yeah," Irvine thought. "It's a pretty story, the way she tells it. But you have to see both sides."

So Catkin had orchestrated a brilliant traitor's arrangement. A web of informants who had little love for the country protecting them, who sold themselves, like callous mercenaries, to Adel's spymasters. And for a time it worked. Catkin herself, undercover as a normal reporter, went undetected; and her men became fanatics in her name, determined to use the war to end the Galbadian alliance at all costs, even at the cost of takeover by Adel.

Until a middling general by the name of Caraway (possibly they knew him?) should intercept one of their communications. Grim and quiet and not terribly personable, Caraway was nevertheless a diehard patriot, a man who dreamt of United Galbadia, who thirsted for battle, who became committed to tracking down each and every traitor and seeing them punished.

Caraway's men killed a fair few, those that resisted. But overall they were merciful. Caraway's sweetheart was Timberi by birth, and the general had a soft spot for her countrymen by extension. So Catkin and the bulk of her men became political prisoners. Loyal Dollet, Catkin's old hometown, agreed to host them on the far north coast, where they could do no harm. Then, after the war was over and the threat of Adel gone, they could turn over the prisoners to Deling City for a trial.

Catkin's men spent the latter half of the war in the strongest fortification Dollet had to offer: the old Holy Dolletian castle that stood where the continent met the Northern peninsula. Conditions there were probably better than they deserved. The castle was ancient, but secure and imposing. It still recalled the days when the statesmen of old, dukes and kings, princesses and sorceresses clad all in red, had argued forcefully with the people of Dollet for the dream of a united Galbadian continent. It was a fitting place to put these traitors. Not a cruel place. But simply one that would remind them, at every step, that they were fighting against inevitability.

It is said that, when Adel mysteriously vanished and Esthar retreated, Catkin's men did not celebrate. They stormed their guards, demanded to be set free. They had lost, but they wanted to take Galbadia down in any way possible. The Dolletians radioed Deling City, terrified that Catkin and her men would escape and wreak havoc on their small seaside town.

Vincenza Deling herself came out, with a force of soldiers a hundred strong. They sought to put down the rebellion, and take Catkin and her men to the D-District prison for trial. But, somehow, perhaps through some illicit connection, Catkin had gotten hold of a bomb. When Vincenza arrived and attempted to talk sense into the rebels, she detonated it, killing Vincenza, herself, her men, and anyone in a five hundred meter radius.

The only reason anyone knew what had happened was because the residents of Dollet had seen the smoke go up, and pieced together the story in the days afterwards.

_So Catkin died rather than go to the D-District? _said Siren.

"Can you blame her?" Irvine thought.

And so now all that was left of the original castle was a hole in the earth, and a great expanse of blackened, sooty dirt in the North, stretching out in all directions. A piece of original, beautiful Galbadian heritage was lost. Vincenza, most brilliant of the Delings, was gone. The heads of Dollet and Timber submitted themselves to a loose association with Deling City after this, almost more out of humiliation than genuine thanks for the Galbadian army's defense of them during the war, and the alliance settled back into an uneasy peace for the most part, interrupted only by bands of rebels who were stupid enough to see more than death and betrayal in Catkin's horrible, honorless suicide run.

* * *

So that was Missy's story. Selphie thought she could detect a bias.

* * *

When Raijin found himself pulled back into his own head, something odd happened. The sorceress wasn't there. Another girl, one with perfectly nice brown eyes, who looked like the first otherwise, but older, was sitting in her place. She nodded to someone just out of sight. She said, "Shoo, shoo, bad bedside manner."

It took Raijin a few moments to process this.

Every bone in his body hurt. Before he'd been expelled from his own mind, he'd been hurting for so long that he'd no longer really felt it. But now he did feel it. It came roaring back. The pain from his ribs, wrists, knees, and ankles. His left cheekbone, which felt bruised and raw. Where the skin on his back had come off. Where he'd nearly bitten through his tongue.

"Hey," said the new girl. "She's gone. It's just me. Listen. Listen. I think I know a way to get Seifer back."

Raijin was so disoriented that for a minute he couldn't understand why they'd want to bring Seifer back. They'd only be bringing him back _here_. He worked his way around the gumminess in his mouth, and said this.

The girl rolled her eyes. "So he can rescue you, and the two of you can go get Garden, and then you'll all fix this place. Duh."


	8. Chapter 8

"I've got to tell you, Missy," Selphie said, once Missy had concluded her story, "That hardly seems like an impartial account."

Missy shrugged. She said, "I fly the Cactus Jack, Selphie Tilmitt of Trabia. The truth as I see it is Galbadian. And the fact is, things between Galbadia and Timber are much more complicated than dear Rinoa probably makes them out to be."

"She's half Timberi. I think if anyone sees the whole picture, it's her," Selphie said, defensive on behalf of her friend.

"She's tugged in two directions," said Missy. "You try seeing everything when you're that split in half."

Not that Missy saw everything, Irvine thought. She clearly didn't feel it was at all strange that Vincenza Deling had disappeared just as Vinzer had come of age to take the presidency himself, on Dolletian lands where it would fall to Dollet to sort things out, and with a parcel of starving, isolated Timberi prisoners to take the fall for the whole thing.

Mighty convenient, that.

Vinzer Deling must have had some fine operatives back in the day. SeeD couldn't have set up a better result for him. _Martine_ couldn't have.

They passed the G-Hotel. Missy took them down a side street, then pulled up to the curb and set her permits on the dashboard before stepping out of the car.

"This is it," she said, gesturing at a building tucked behind a small cobbled courtyard a few meters away.

It was an elegant little building, perfectly circular and domed, almost like a bank, but with few accoutrements, no faux-Acenath columns, only one large round doorway leading inside. The sign for a perfume shop was hung in the courtyard, but when Missy stepped through the door the salesgirl at the counter took one look at her and waved them through to the back. They descended a spiral staircase hung with globular, eerie green lamps and notches lit by some strange blue crystal. At the bottom, a dark-haired man in nondescript tan manned the door. He nodded once to Missy, demanded to see Selphie's papers, which she produced (false, supplied by Xu, but then he didn't know that). Then, oddly enough, he simply waved Irvine through.

Oh.

_You've been here before,_ Siren said.

He didn't remember it. At all. It must have been with someone, someone in the know, someone he also couldn't remember right now.

"Do you have the memory?" he thought at Siren.

_I have mostly random monster battles, _she informed him sulkily. _And one or two interesting things, but not very many. That's all you said I could have. I'd like something a little more riveting._

"What's the deal with that?" Selphie asked Irvine, as they passed down a long, dimly-lit corridor that sloped down, down, down.

"Ah," Irvine said, running a hand through his hair. "Well—"

"He's been here before, obviously," said Missy, from in front of them. "Though I wish he'd told me that before I offered to drive you here."

"I don't remember," Irvine clarified, more for Selphie's benefit than hers.

"Oh, were you drinking?" Missy said, sounding unsurprised. "Well, you are Galbadia's most famous person right now, just as she's Trabia's. So naturally you're going to want to let loose a bit."

The way she said that, blithely, easily – not the part about Irvine letting loose; Irvine hadn't really let loose since the end of the war, since he'd met Selphie again and his friends again and been given a proper job and steady pay and a reason to put up his hat at night and go to bed, at peace. No, the part about Irvine being Galbadia's most famous person. That shocked him.

Because it really hit him for what seemed like the first time.

Rinoa was probably equally famous. Infamous. They were both infamous. And Irvine had always enjoyed a certain low-level infamy. But not like this. It was one thing to be the wisecracking loner, irresistible to women, there at night and gone by daybreak. It was quite another to see this fantasy blown up, distorted, transformed into the byword for a depraved lifestyle.

He thought of Rill Tremlett. He had put Rill out of his mind for the time being, put the pictures out of his mind—

_You gave them to me,_ Siren said. _Don't worry. I was incensed and humiliated and angry on your behalf._

This...this was the thing. About Irvine. And his memories. Right after the war, his friends had wanted to know why he didn't tell them right off, why he had seemed upset over their forgetting, which of course they couldn't help. Why he'd made a secret of their time at the orphanage, a memory that they all could have shared and that belonged to all of them.

And the truth was, he'd assumed they'd given their time at the orphanage to the GFs. Knowingly. On purpose. He'd assumed that they'd figured out that you could give away memories deliberately. Why not? He had, and he had less experience with GFs than they did. So he'd simply believed that they, like him, had willingly and consciously traded away their pasts. Specifically, those parts of their pasts that hadn't meant anything to them and hadn't been valuable. For Irvine, the most valuable moments in his life had been the orphanage, so he'd kept those. Whereas for the others - cheerful Selphie, team captain Squall, perfect SeeD Quistis, and beloved son Zell - maybe the orphanage hadn't meant as much. Maybe Irvine hadn't meant as much. So obviously they'd just given him away.

He'd been so ashamed when the truth had come out: that only he really understood what was going on and that only he had tossed away parts of his life. That the others were just hapless victims. So he'd covered it up at first. His memory trade-offs. He'd just told them that as far as he knew there were no GFs at G-garden, he'd only junctioned until recently, that was why. Why he alone remembered them.

Not because he'd traded away bits and pieces of his life to keep them.

Only now this lie loomed large and obvious. There were G-garden cadets advocating GF use among a highly patriotic subsection of the most expansionist empire on the planet. The most dangerous city on the planet, from Balamb Garden's perspective. The city Irvine should know a lot about. And maybe if Irvine had been a little bit more honest or a little bit less reckless with his memory trade-offs, he could have helped them avoid this mess.

He wondered which GF Ruta's cadet had a hold of. There weren't many he could think of that hadn't eventually made it to Balamb. Atomos? No. He could swear Xu had assigned that one to a SeeD cleaning up monsters in Esthar. Of course, he would have known for sure if he'd just bothered to come clean to Xu. It was one thing to lie between friends. Another to be dishonest to a Garden superior.

He thought of Rill Tremlett, of the images in the magazine.

Maybe he deserved to have his past blow up in his face. He felt sick, uneasy, unhappy that anyone, from people he loved, like Selphie, to people he'd just met today, like Missy, could walk to the nearest shop and purchase a five page spread on his past, his stupid decisions, his romantic failures, his vulnerability, and every inch of his prepubescent self. He felt something he hoped desperately he'd never wrought on anybody else, not that he could ever know for sure with his memory as patchworked as it was: he felt contaminated.

Giving away his memories had always been a way to keep himself as pure and happy as he'd been at the orphanage. Carefree. Not weighed down. It was second nature at this point to pass off the overwhelming discomfort he felt in thinking of Rill to Siren. The moment it became a memory, he let her lay claim to it. Take it off his mind. But he couldn't keep it from intruding on his life again, not when it was plastered on the newsstands. And he couldn't erase the part of him that wasn't memories, that was just some lonely loser from the outskirts, and that would always, always feel the bile rise in his throat now, when he was reminded that his sexual experiences cost ten gil at the item shop. There was a core part of him that was angry and humiliated. And he could try to shove the memories of that humiliation at the GFs, like he'd done with Bexley, with his former lovers, with his worst moments at G-garden. But he couldn't get rid of his gut reaction.

And obviously he wouldn't be able to keep the world from shoving his worst behavior in his face.

"Irvy," Selphie put in at this point. "Are you alright?"

He tipped his cap. He was fine. Fine. Perfect.

This was probably another opportunity to be honest here, to let her know that Irvine Kinneas, the grown up incarnation of Irvine her friend, was a bit more cracked below the surface than he let on. But he didn't. He couldn't. The words dried up in his throat.

They reached the end of the corridor. The man at the inner door waved them all in after sizing them up and demanding a (very hefty) cover charge. And then –

A low cavern, painted with frolicking historical figures: naked Nah, sexually-posed Acenath. Many branching rooms off of the side, each dimly lit and warm and smoky, with people passing in and out, laughing. Someone was playing a tinkling melody at a piano, and in front of them a girl in nothing but nipple pasties was taking people's coats. The central room here was lit again by those strange crystals, and Selphie and Missy's faces became distorted, indistinct, strangely alien in the light. There was Tonberry dust on a table to their right, being weighed and parceled out as if it were no illegal substance, just some light recreation. From the cavern on their left came a party of people dressed up like Shumi, though they were clearly not Shumi. One dropped her robe to reveal a bikini, to shrieking applause and laughter

"I'll find you Tulip," Missy said, looking uncomfortable in her Gryphon Preparatory cardigan and schoolgirl skirt. "She's bound to be around here somewhere. You know, she's not a very upright girl."

"Isn't she? Shocking," said Selphie. "Well, at least she's fun."

Selphie was regarding the proceedings with some interest. Trabia was not known for its club scene. More for its scenic lakes and white-capped mountains and for healthy pursuits like skiing and ice skating and that weird old-person sport where you strapped flat baskets to your feet and tromped around in snow. Walking. That was it.

"How come you've never taken me here?" she asked Irvine, once Missy had darted off to find Tulip Ruta.

"I didn't remember that I'd even been here!" said Irvine.

Selphie poked him. "Well, someplace like it, then," she said.

It had never occurred to him. He'd thrown up a divider in his mind between wholesome, innocent, perfect Selphie and, well, every other relationship in his life, which had largely been conducted out of smoke-filled rooms like these, and which had ended abruptly when people realized he was a consummate liar and an emotional coward.

Luckily, before he could come up with something to explain this away, Missy appeared. She was dragging someone behind her. A long-faced brunette with deep-set green eyes and a sparkly green dress that probably cost at least 35,000 gil for its one square meter of fabric.

There was no G-Garden cadet.

Missy lurched over a drunk, giggling young man who'd stumbled into her path, and caught hold of Selphie's arm.

"I think they had a fight," she hissed. "Tulip and her cadet. Not surprising. They have nothing in common."

Tulip Ruta eyed Selphie and Irvine sulkily.

"These are Rinoa's friends?' she said flatly. "They don't look like they're from Timber."

Nice of Missy to try and provide them some kind of cover. Not strictly necessary, since they were already operating under a cover with Missy herself. But still. Good thinking. A cover story to cover the cover story.

"You don't seem anything like what I'd expect a Deling City rich girl to look like," Selphie told her chirpily. "Short skirts, dens of vice, magic."

"Our local soldiers and cadets use magic all the time," Tulip retorted.

"Some soldier or cadet get you into GFs?" said Irvine.

"Maybe," Tulip said. She pointedly examined her nails, clearly annoyed to be having this conversation.

Missy nudged her. "Tell them his name," she said.

"Why?" said Tulip. Then she narrowed her eyes at them. "Do I know you? You look familiar."

There was only so much new haircuts, a different hat, and some changes of clothes could do for them. Irvine and Selphie still had faces Tulip would probably see whenever she strolled up to the magazine rack at the Deling City train station. But they couldn't let that faze them. Irvine straightened up, put some no-nonsense, non-Kinneas seriousness into his face. He always tried to channel Squall when people identified him. The Commander's overall demeanor was so unlike Irvine that it usually threw people off balance.

For her part, Selphie only had to smile extra bright. No one ever reported her as smiling. She was from Trabia Garden; people assumed she stayed in bed all day and cried.

"Do you know magic use is forbidden inside the city?" Selphie said brightly, glossing over Tulip's question. "Funny, right? Almost like what you guys did to Timber."

Tulip rolled her eyes.

"Please," she said. "You people are—Why do you even care about my magic use? Why do Rinoa's friends from Timber give an Anacondaur's ass about my magic use?"

Missy stared at them, panicky. "Well, Tul—" she began.

But she was interrupted. Someone in one of the back rooms screamed. They heard the sound of shots, as if from a machine gun. Missy seized both Irvine and Selphie's arms, looking frightened, and Tulip Ruta seemed to blink out of whatever drug haze she'd been in, and turned for the door.

Which was barricaded. By Deling City soldiers.

"Oh, grat poop," Selphie said.

As SeeDs, they could technically be in the city. No problems there. But, per the ceasefire, there were only a limited number of things they could actually do here. What they'd told Caraway qualified just fine. It made them out to be bodyguards sniffing out a potential threat: normal SeeD behavior. But who knew whether sitting around in a (clearly illegal) den of vice brought them over the edge, into prohibited activity?

Selphie, quick-thinker that she was, grabbed Tulip Ruta with one hand, nodded to Irvine, and propelled them all in the direction of one of the rooms furthest from where the shots had come from.

"Is there a back entrance to this place that Missy wouldn't know about?" she demanded of Tulip Ruta. "Is the army doing some kind of raid on both ends?"

Tulip shrugged uselessly, looking terrified. Irvine had only a little pity for her; if this entire mess came down to her own selfish desire to see what being a magic-user was like, then she deserved whatever came her way. But Missy he really pitied, since the poor girl didn't have to be here. He manhandled her behind a nearby chaise lounge, garish and red, and put a finger to his lips, urging her to stay quiet in case the Deling military police burst into the room. She stared at him, shocked, but seemed to get it, and nodded. Then he turned to Selphie. There was a small hidden screen in one corner, painted with more naked figures, practically blending into the wall. Selphie noticed it at the same time he did, and shoved Tulip Ruta behind it, because Selphie was essentially a good person, despite her dark humor and occasional violent streak.

So Irvine, almost unthinkingly, shoved Selphie in after Tulip.

There was no room for him. He whirled around, looking for some other form of cover. There was a low bar at the other end of the room, behind which people were crouching, scared. This would be the perfect place to get in some short-range shots in from, if the situation deteriorated to that point. Irvine strode across to it, reached it, went to bend down—

And someone caught him by the shoulder, kneed him in the back, right where his kidney was, and pulled him down to the floor.

It hurt like Hyne's own curse.

Irvine blinked.

Fury Caraway stared down at him, disgusted.

Fuck.

"I expect I'll find Rinoa around here," he said, so slowly and deliberately and softly that it sounded like some threat out of an old movie, the knight making good on a promise to destroy all who opposed his sorceress. Which. The guy was talking about his daughter, so. Gross.

"This hardly seems like protecting her," Caraway continued, "Coming to a place like this. We received a tip that a G-Garden threat was here. But the only G-Garden cadet I'm seeing here is… You."

Well, they'd gotten the same tip he had, obviously. This was easy enough to clear up. Irvine opened his mouth to say this. Caraway kicked him in the side. While he was down.

Fucking _Hyne_. He kicked like his daughter did. Hard.

"If you've hidden an innocent Galbadian girl from a good family here," Caraway said easily, "I will have your head."

He was clearly talking about Rinoa, and thankfully Rinoa was not here. But suddenly it occurred to Irvine that poor Missy Spaiss was. He looked to his right, to where she was hiding behind the divan, almost on reflex, as if to reassure himself that she was fine, still undetected.

Caraway hauled him to his feet.

"You have a tic," he told Irvine easily.

"Excuse me?" Irvine forced out, still somewhat shocked by all the kicking. And kidney punching. And totalitarian crackdown-ing.

"A tic," Caraway said. "When I mentioned my daughter. You looked to the right."

Oh. Hyne the Divine. Caraway was a general now. But way back when he'd been a spy-catcher, too. So of course he'd notice your reflexes, your hidden movements, the things even you didn't know you were doing.

"Check behind that divan," Caraway demanded.

"Rinoa's not there!" Irvine said.

No use. Caraway's men kicked over the divan, and revealed a very terrified Missy. Poor Missy.

"Nice company you're keeping, Miss Spaiss," Caraway said. He sounded surprised, but that leached out of his tone quickly enough when he added, "Rinoa's influence, no doubt."

"N-no—" Missy forced out. "She teleported. Ages ago."

Caraway blinked. He'd probably had no idea his daughter could do that. To be fair, his daughter couldn't. It was just some lie of Selphie's.

Fuck. Selphie. What if Caraway asked after Selphie? What if he asked after Selphie and Irvine, stupid traitorous Irvine with his tics, led Caraway straight to her? Caraway was clearly not in a forgiving mood right now, or even in much of a mood to listen, and Irvine didn't like the thought of Selphie in the hands of a man like that.

Selphie was joy, and laughter on a beach, and the pure snow of Trabia. She was not there to be manhandled or kidney-punched. She was not what Caraway would undoubtedly classify her as: upstart Garden trash.

"Take Miss Spaiss to the Commissioner's office. Call her parents," Caraway ordered. Missy squeaked. She was led away.

"There was another one of you," Caraway said, after a minute.

And somehow, Irvine's brain – all those firing neurons he couldn't control – came up with the plan before Irvine's mind—that is, the sensible inner part of him that was rational and that directed the GFs, bargained with them, really controlled them, really thought its thoughts out properly – could offer any input.

It was a fairly simple plan. To protect Selphie.

_Oh, _Siren said, echoing this plan. _Of course I can take every moment she spent with you today. Not a problem._

And then, suddenly, Selphie was gone. Not all of her. Just her today. Whatever she'd done alongside him. Wherever she was right now. He knew she had to be somewhere, just as he knew she'd been assigned to this mission with him, had boarded the train with them yesterday, had doubtlessly reached the city at the same time he and Rinoa had.

There was just a vague, fuzzy block around all his memories today. He wasn't even sure what they'd discovered. He could recall everything Missy had said to him directly; he still knew they had a G-Garden kid running around with GFs. He could even recall Tulip Ruta's sulky face. But where was Tulip now? With Selphie? She had to be. Because her location was missing. It was in the wooly hole in his head, the one Siren had left behind when she'd yanked out his recent experiences with his girlfriend.

"Where is SeeD Tilmitt?" demanded General Caraway.

And Irvine honestly didn't know. He shrugged.

Caraway sneered at him, disgust etched into his features.

"You know, once I pulled you out of some trouble at the D-District," Caraway told Irvine. "It made sense at the time. Martine's notes on you said you had…connections there. I wanted to do you a favor, a nice Deling boy like you. Getting arrested would have been a blow to your poor father."

Irvine had very little sentiment for his adoptive father, so he shrugged again.

"Clearly I was too kind," Caraway noted. "You dragged my daughter back there anyway."

No, he hadn't. She'd kicked him down a flight of stairs, and then dragged him. But, taking the measure of Fury Caraway, Irvine decided he wouldn't reveal that because firstly he didn't think it would help him. Caraway clearly already thought Irvine was scum and there would clearly be little changing his mind on that account. And, secondly, Irvine felt bad enough for Rinoa for having to deal with this guy all her life. She didn't need him making it worse by pointing out her misbehavior and making Caraway even more viciously overprotective than he already was.

"Take him to the D-District," Caraway said, shoving him at some soldiers. He was a very, very strong man, Irvine realized belatedly. You wouldn't think it to look at him, but he was. Irvine, six feet tall and no petite flower in terms of weight, was propelled backwards by the force of Caraway's push and practically shoved into the arms of his captors. He blinked, somewhat dazed.

And was stunned to see an equally dazed Tulip Ruta appear behind Caraway and a squadron of Caraway's soldiers. Seemingly out of nowhere. Just out of the lewdly painted wall or something.

"Um," she said. She sounded scared stiff. "SeeD Kinneas didn't do anything wrong. He was just meeting me here. To get a tip on the G-Garden cadet illegally using magic. The one that might hurt Rinoa. The cadet's name is Hobbs. Hobbs Worth." She smiled. An uneasy, frightened thing. Not a pretty smile. Lips parting, teeth firmly clenched in nervousness. Hesitant, afraid, so uncomfortable it looked like she was hiding shards of glass in her mouth.

_Hobbs Worth?_ Siren said. _Him?_

It didn't make sense to Irvine either.

"Miss Ruta," Caraway said, plainly aghast. "Well. I can't say I'm pleased to find two of you girls here. Same routine as with Miss Spaiss." He waved Tulip in the direction of one of his men. Tulip shrunk a bit, but went where he'd gestured. The soldier led her away.

"This one can still spend the night at the D-District," Caraway said, pointing at Irvine once she'd gone.

"What?" Irvine said, dismayed. "She just confirmed that I was only doing the same thing you are! Protecting Rinoa!"

"With the kind of people Rinoa brings home," Caraway said lightly, "You'd be spending the night in my house otherwise. I can't say I like that. And I think it's time I commandeered her little mission. She didn't need to hire SeeDs. I'm her father. I can look after her. And now that I have Mr. Worth's name, it should go smoothly enough."

Which. That still didn't make any sense. Hobbs Worth had been in some of Irvine's classes. Hobbs Worth was—

"Cast sleep," Caraway ordered.

Irvine didn't get to finish the thought. He was out like a light.

When he woke up, it was in a cell, and most of the muscles in his body hurt. Siren was buzzing excitedly in his brain for some reason, but Irvine didn't get a chance to pay much attention to her, because a very familiar face was staring down at him.

An eternally-swollen face. Red. With thinning brown hair and a sparse brown mustache and permanent bags underneath the watery blue eyes, and a look of complete dissatisfaction.

"Caraway's ordered us to ship you back to your SeeDs in Balamb," Bexley said, by way of greeting.

Well. Hyne hid a ray of sunshine in every shitpile, they said.

"But not 'til mornin'," Bexley continued. "He said I could keep you 'til then. Which I will. We should talk."

"I'd rather not," Irvine said.

"You know what people are printin' about you?" Bexley said.

Well, he hadn't been thinking about it, but now he was. Thanks, Bexley.

"You know how humiliated I am?" Bexley said. "First you don't come home after the War—"

"It's not my home anymore," Irvine said. "It's a pretty crap home."

"Sleep your way across Esthar," Bexley said, ignoring him. "Dirty-minded like you are. Then you take up with this poor girl outta Trabia, who you're probably no good for. You fuck up the lives of the people around you, y'know. You did it to me. Gonna do it to this girl. Gonna do it to—"

Hobbs Worth. The next name on Caraway's black list. It flashed into Irvine's mind right then. He tuned Bexley out.

_You think Worth is in trouble, _Siren said.

And Irvine did. Because. Because it occurred to him, right then, that something was rotten. Tulip Ruta had pegged Worth as some kind of magic user, their rebel right in Deling City; and Missy had given the impression, from what he could remember of the library and the car ride to the club, that Tulip's cadet was dissatisfied with the status quo. But that was wrong. It was off.

Hobbs Worth had never been dissatisfied a day in his life. He'd been the most un-rebellious, unthinking soul in G-Garden. A born follower, just how Martine liked them. Someone who never raised a fuss, who balked at no orders, who never thought for himself, who accepted everything Fate threw at him. The ideal Garden cadet. Irvine, an outsider who Martine had very much disliked, had thought little of Worth. Worth bent at the knee every power above him, to Martine and to his clients and to any Deling official he happened to meet. And as a result he'd always been rewarded, down the line. You scratch my back; I kill grats for you. The Deling City way. So no. This wasn't right. Worth never had reason to be dissatisfied. Or to break the rules.

Their rebel magic user? Couldn't be Worth. Irvine was sure of it.

* * *

The decommissioned SeeD transport bobbed just below the waters off the coast of Dollet. It stayed there for some time; during the hours the Dolletians were most likely to discover it, the high fishing hours of the morning and afternoon. At the early evening siesta, in which the Dolletians all retired to their homes to nap and the streets fell empty, coincidentally the same hour in which Irvine Kinneas was being arrested by the Galbadian military police, the transport came to the surface. Cid had programmed it to arrive at this time. When no one would be around to notice.

The transport stayed put long enough to let off its passenger. This person stumbled out, limping. They left behind the blanket and most of the bandages. They took the battered long grey coat, and somehow wrapped it around themselves in such a way that it became a strange banner, a defiant flag fluttering behind them in the wind.

They went to the house of the sorceress. Very few people knew that Dollet's sorceress was a sorceress. She wasn't crazy enough to reveal it to anyone.

She simply went by Rexa, the Card Queen.

She answered the knock at the door, and saw the coat first.

"You," she snarled. But then she caught sight of the person under the coat.

They weren't what she was expecting to see.

"Honey, you'd better come in," she said.

* * *

"Arrested," Xu said to Selphie Tilmitt.

"Yeah…" Selphie said. She was in a seedy bar in the outskirts. After putting the fear of Hyne into Tulip Ruta to get her to reveal the name of their SeeD cadet and to confess to Caraway in the process, in the vain hope that this might keep Irvine from being sent to prison, Selphie had stayed crouched behind her concealed screen for an hour, as the police arrested the people at the bar, and all horrible totalitarian activity slowly died down.

Then she'd crept out of town in the vain hope that she might find a car rental that didn't report you to the government, so that she could head out to the desert. Because there was no way she was going to let Irvy rot in prison. She'd helped take down the old D-District. She could take down the new, rebuilt one as well.

"And Rinoa?" Xu asked, as if half-fearful of the answer. "I only ask because we have to keep tabs on her. Not because she's a SeeD."

"Er," Selphie said. "Still AWOL. Technically."

"AWOL," Xu said.

"AWOL," Selphie confirmed.

Xu said something that sounded impossibly romantic because it was in Dolletian-accented old Nah. But by now Selphie had known Xu long enough to realize that when she lapsed into one of her mother tongues, it was only because she was letting the Headmistress façade slip long enough to curse like a sailor.

"I'll negotiate with the D-district," Xu forced out, when she was done cursing. "You—you get back in the city. Find us our missing sorceress."

She sounded incredibly put-upon to be ordering the retrieval of Rinoa, a girl whose safety was, on paper, Garden's top priority. Off paper, Rinoa was someone Xu had attempted to flush out of Garden multiple times. She made no secret of the fact that she found Rinoa incredibly obnoxious.

Selphie preferred Rinoa to Xu. Rinoa was her friend; Xu was simply her boss. But she still felt a little bad for Xu. Xu had an uncompromising temperament and a thankless job. This was not a great combo if you wanted to cut back on work-related stress.

"Maybe Squall's mission is going better," Selphie said, by way of comfort.

"There's no way," Xu said, as evenly as she could probably manage, "That it could be going any worse than yours."

* * *

"This is the most boring mission I've ever been on in my life," Zell told Quistis, when they were staked out alone on the far side of the sinkhole. "And hot. It's really freakin' hot."

Quistis could concur on both points. They were doing very little today. Just observing, measuring the sinkhole, taking notes on the environment, photographing what they could, and relaying the images to their Ancient Centran expert back at Garden. After their experiences defeating Ultimecia, something like this was almost an extension of their vacation.

Except that no one ever went to the Kashkabald for a vacation. The Kashkabald in daytime meant skin-peeling heat so powerful it you could actually feel yourself roasting. Occasionally, the thermostat here even climbed up to heat so stifling you thought your eyeballs might actually be melting in their sockets.

Squall, with the impersonal care of a true leader, kept offering her water in order to combat the heat. Zell did the same, though he probably did it less because Quistis was a valued member of the team and they couldn't have her dying of dehydration, and more because his mother back in Balamb had taught him that it was important to care about others, and that boys who let girls die of thirst deserved to be sharply cuffed on the back of the head.

Quistis didn't actually need that much water, though?

She was a Blue Mage. It took a lot to dehydrate her. She rarely felt hunger. She had a whole parcel of spells at her disposal, and apparently the ability to survive tough conditions came with the territory.

She'd discovered her Blue Magic when she was ten. A junk trader had come into town with a whole range of curiosities he'd picked up across the Galbadian continent. Necklaces of fire opals from the desert; curious books of genealogy from the weird Winhill area, where women took men's names; antiquated tech from suburban Deling City; old magazines from Timber; and bizarre rocks, caked with dust and shaped like little people, from the Northern peninsula where the Kalevan had once lived. Quistis's adoptive parents had not liked her talking to people like this; they were Dolletian old money, which meant a good last name but actually very little money. Still, they'd believed she had to keep a distance from Dolletian no money, which was basically everyone in Dollet, and also everybody from outside Dollet until you hit Deling City, particularly trash like junk traders.

But Quistis had talked to the junk trader. She'd wanted to buy something. She'd had her own money by then. She'd earned it, because she'd always kept busy as a child. She'd been as unhappy then as she was now, as far as she could tell, and she'd discovered early on that working at something, filling up your day with things to do, could stave off moodiness and insecure thoughts. You just had to…tire yourself out. So that was exactly what she'd done. She'd taken paper routes, delivered fruit from street vendors to buyers at the radio tower, collected and sold seashells by the waterfront. Her parents were already slightly dissatisfied with her – she simply wasn't a lovable child, they said; it was good to be pretty, but something about this one's prettiness was just not lovable— so it was nothing to them if she disappeared for some time each day. So she had. In that time, she'd earned her pocket money as Dollet's go-to girl for nondescript errands. She could afford to purchase some junk, now and then, and she'd purchased one of those funny Kalevan rocks.

It looked like a little black stone man. The rounded top was his bald head. The vast middle was his barrel chest. The excrescences on the sides? His powerful arms. The notch near the top was his grin, something halfway between merry and sad. He seemed sad somehow. Quistis had liked him. He'd cost two gil.

She'd taken him down a side street after purchasing him, and come across the Painter Gang.

The Painter Gang ruled Dollet's streets. Until Quistis had come on the scene, they'd had a monopoly on just about every single child-friendly task you could earn money at. They ran childish card rackets, sold milk in the square, washed windows, and had once reigned supreme at the seashell trade. Once. Until Quistis had shown up. They did not like her; she was, to their mind, snooty and horrible. And they were a band of backstreets ruffians who would not make friends with her, perhaps because – Quistis struggled to pull memories that would make more sense of this, memories of herself younger and happier with her own gang at the orphanage – sometime between Centra and her encounter with the junk trader, Quistis had lost her ability to really relate to or make friends with children her own age.

The Painter Gang cornered her and clearly intended to rough her up. Their ringleader was an older girl, sharp and dangerous, and she had a cousin and a brother and another cousin and a baby sister, and every last one of these was slightly more hard-edged and ambitious than she was, so Quistis had never had any idea how she managed to keep them under control. But she had. Possibly by constantly setting them on scapegoats like the pretty rich girl who thought she could muscle in on their territory.

So they'd come at her. And she'd clutched her little rock man, frightened out of her wits, and suddenly felt him grow very, very hot.

There was magic in him, somehow. Blue magic. Specifically, a very small defensive spell, which threw up a kind of shield in front of her, and the Painter Gang ran right into it, and smacked their childish heads, and blood dripped from their noses, and they screamed and ran to tell their parents, and before you knew it? Everyone in Dollet knew that Saffir and Lina Trepe's adoptive daughter was a Blue Mage.

Even Saffir and Lina Trepe, who consorted with very few ordinary Dolletians, somehow chanced to learn it, possibly because some of their less well-named but incredibly resentful neighbors had taken pains to tell them about it, wanting to see their faces when they learned that the pretty, well-behaved child they'd purchased was defective.

Blue Magic wasn't as bad as sorceress magic, obviously. But it was still magic. Inhuman. Not right. Below para magic, which was something for soldiers, who at least had the excuse that casting helped them fight Esthar. But blue magic… Blue magic was sure proof that the girl who possessed it might be a sorceress candidate. That is, she might have a tendency to go wild, uncontrollable, savage, soak in the wickedness of Hyne's profane magical half.

Lina had gone to Quistis's bedroom that very night, which was a thing she never did, and had grabbed Quistis's hairbrush and begun to brush Quistis's hair, which was also a thing she never did. Which was a good thing. Because she hadn't been very good at it. She didn't brush so much as she pulled. Angrily. Hard.

"Do you know what Blue Magic is?" she'd said, as she did this.

Quistis had not.

"It's something the Shumi of the East had," Lina had told her. "Not something people have. Not even something the Shumi who live close by in the North have. It's for Estharian Shumi. Evil Eastern monsters. Do you know how it gets into a person?"

"Ow," was all Quistis had been able to say, because her hair was being pulled so often and so hard that at this point there were tears in her eyes.

Lina brought her mouth down to Quistis's ear. Quistis could see her face in the mirror. Lina looked very like she did, enough that people might have assumed she was Quistis's natural mother if she and Saffir hadn't run around telling them straight-out that Saffir had suffered injuries in the war, and they'd had to adopt. But Quistis's face had never looked as simultaneously gleeful and furious as Lina's did right then. Lina said, "Blue magic came into the human bloodstream when the Estharians went to destroy their local Shumi villages. And do you know what they did? Before they killed the Shumi, they found the Shumi's hidden women. And they raped them. And they forced them to give birth to the babies, to give to Adel so that Adel could devour their blue magic. And then—"

Here she yanked Quistis's hair particularly hard.

"I guess one or two escaped. And tricked the people who adopted them into thinking they were a nice, human, Dolletian child."

Quistis did look Dolletian. The original, best flavor of Galbadian. Blue eyes, Western-pale in their color, nothing like the black-eyed wickedness of the Estharians. Hair too fair to come from the rest of the Galbadian continent – it had to be from old Dollet. The whole package. But Saffir and Lina had always suspected the package was leaky or faulty; that the blonde was not properly golden but little too much like the wheat-coloring of certain savage tribes of old Esthar. And anyway they'd never made any secret of the fact that it was the wrong package altogether. Really they'd wanted a boy, who would be less open to receiving any magic of any kind, but the only properly blond, light-eyed Dolletian-seeming boy left at the orphanage when they'd gotten there had been such a horrible little ogre that they had no choice but to accept second-best.

Well, now second-best had proven to be completely worthless.

They'd called Cid Kramer and enrolled Quistis in B-Garden the next day. She would have gone to G-Garden, but for the fact that they knew people who sent their children there, and if Quistis had gone to school with those children they might have had to hear about her down the line, and they would have had to accept that she had not, in fact, evaporated into nothing as soon as they'd decided they didn't want her.

They'd changed their minds, in recent months. Really famous people like Fury Caraway had turned out to have magic daughters. It was in fashion now. And Quistis herself was now famous, on magazine stands, in newspapers looking very photogenic. Quistis was a household name, something one might be able to make money off of. It seemed her adoptive parents done just that. The Trepies had invited them to Garden just before Quistis had gone on vacation. They'd shown up in one of her classes, Lina in fur and Saffir wearing a watch that must have cost at least a few thousand gil. They'd tried to talk to her afterwards, she'd told them (keeping her cool all the while) that she was busy. Then some photographer who'd snuck past the guy at the gate had taken pictures, and Quistis had fled up to Xu's office, and then? She'd had a small mental breakdown.

Small. Very small. Not even tears or anything, since Quistis hadn't had a serious crying fit since she'd been eight and the Painter Gang ringleader had yanked off a good chunk of her hair in a skirmish.

"You're going on vacation," Xu had said, without bothering to look up from her paperwork.

"Yeah, I'll think about it," Quistis had said, her face buried in her hands. "I'll clock my time in at some point. But this month I still have a para-magic class to sketch out for Frecht; he can't plan his classes to save his life, and—"

"That was not a request," Xu had said. "I will throw you out of here if I have to. Don't make me have people bodily escort you to the door. It'll make Squall storm in here in a huff like he owns the place. And then I'll have to put him on vacation." She stopped, considered this. "No," she said, suddenly blissful. "You know what? You're all on vacation. Oh. Oh, yeah."

This was the thing about Xu. It was hard to see her as a friend, a real friend, because usually she only helped you when it was convenient for her to do so, when it fell in line with what she thought Garden needed. That made her an able replacement for Cid, but not really someone you wanted to unload your deepest secrets onto. Even so, she somehow seemed to grasp that Quistis's life wasn't in the best place right now. And she had (buried deep, deep down) some sympathy for her. So she was helping Quistis out rather a lot.

"Hey," Zell said suddenly, looking up from his vidphone and startling Quistis out of her walk down (unhappy) memory lane. It was permissible for her to tune out like this only because just now she was mechanically taking measurements of the top of the pit, the width of the stairs, and any strange markings they came across: a job that required very limited brainpower. Cid said the pit wouldn't disappear until sundown, so it wasn't even like she had to hurry.

Zell was assigned to photos and communication with their Garden contact. It was a task no harder than the one Quistis had, but apparently it gave him pause. He said, "Do you think Xu knows what she's doing, giving us this kid as our contact?" He showed her the name on his phone – it came up automatically, with all relevant data attached, per the new Garden network. Nida. Huh.

"Zell, it's Nida," she pointed out.

"…who?" Zell said.

Okay. She knew GF memory loss could be bad. But this was ridiculous. "You graduated with him," Quistis said. "And I know for a fact that you two were in my class together. I partnered you for the project on field tactics once!"

"…you mean the kid that flies the Garden?" Zell said. He said this the way young children often said, 'You mean that boy who picks his nose and eats paper?' Which was rich, coming from Zell Dincht. He'd actually once been the kid who picked his nose and ate paper.

"If Xu assigned him to us, then he's the one for the job," Quistis said.

"He keeps geekin' out on me, though," Zell complained. "I love history. You know I love history. But, like, useful stuff. Stuff that shows you people you might have known, people your grandparents' age, all the pieces that had to fall into line for you to exist. Not dead languages and weird ancient cults and human sacrifice and sorceresses. You know what I know about Ancient Centrans all of a sudden? Everything. That they ate bitter chocolate smeared on tonberry flesh. That they wore loincloths dyed green with cactuar juice. That they thought minimogs were sacred beings of Hyne, but that chocobos were the reincarnations of faithless men cursed by their wives. Notice a pattern here? All this stuff is interesting enough. But I'm on a mission. I'm in Squall-mode. Professional. I don't need interesting. I need useful. And none of this stuff is useful. It's just takin' him a while to get through the translations because they're in super special High Centran, and he thinks this will entertain me."

Yeah, that sounded like Nida.

"I don't actually think he finds many people to talk to about this stuff," Quistis said. "And, to be honest, he's the only person left in Garden who knows any of it. The only other people who ever bothered with Ancient Centran history were…."

She trailed off. Well. Maybe it was better not to mention them. Zell hadn't liked them very much. Quistis believed herself to be careful of the feelings of others, sometimes over-careful, and in particular she tried to be careful when those people were like Zell, and had feelings that ran hot and passionate and often led to their getting picked on by crueler, smarmier people who were quick to point out: _Hey! It's Dincht! We're the Disciplinary Committee and we hear he eats paper._

Or something like that. Quistis had rarely paid attention to the DC – students too big for their cadet uniforms, who swaggered around under Cid's nose, a tight band of friends in spite of the fact that seriously none of them was at all friendly; somehow, mystifyingly, managing to get by with more genuine confidence in their little fingers than Quistis had in her whole body. Rarely paid attention to them except to occasionally give them a dressing down alongside Xu. The only person in Garden who'd hated the Disciplinary Committee more than Zell had been Xu. Though Zell probably had better reason to hate them.

"Who else knows this stuff?" Zell demanded. "Can we call them? Can we call anybody else? I'm bored enough as it is! My brain is bleedin' outta my ears here."

On the other hand, Seifer Almasy and his cronies would make Zell appreciate working with Nida a little bit more, and that could only be for the good.

"Our last experts were the Disciplinary Committee," Quistis said. "Also this one kid in Trabia who's dead now. But mostly the Disciplinary Committee."

Which. That one kid in Trabia was, randomly, probably dead because of the Disciplinary Committee. Because Seifer Almasy, while appearing to be just a run of the mill jerkass around campus for most of his early life, had, roughly seven months ago, mutated into a (brainwashed? Willing?)murderous jerkass, who'd happily complied with the sorceress Ultimecia-disguised-as-Edea's killstrike on Trabia Garden.

Zell was not a fan of the brainwashing theory. He held Seifer accountable for every death at Trabia Garden. It was easy to see this. It was written on Zell's face. The moment she mentioned the Disciplinary Committee he took on a garish, horrified expression, kind of like the look one might get if for the first time in their life someone else was explaining what brutal serial murders were, or outlining in detail the mass killings of very small children.

Zell did not like Seifer Almasy, or his little lackeys on the Disciplinary Committee.

"'Course," he said grimly, crouching down and punching the ground with one hand, and with the other holding his vidphone so tightly that Quistis worried it was going to crack. "'Course our resident sociopath was into creepy, creepy ancient history."

"I don't think sociopathy and an interest in history are actually at all connected," Quistis said mildly. "Do you want me to take your phone?"

Zell didn't seem to hear her. "Do you think he was, like, into it because of Hyne and the sorceresses bein' from Centra and stuff? Do you think he just had this weird obsession his whole life? I mean, he was always an asshole—"

"He was….messed up," Quistis said. "He was never adopted, you know. And just. He could be really awful if he didn't like you."

"You don't have to tell me that," Zell said. "He and Fujin and Raijin treated me like dirt!"

To punctuate this, he hit the dirt again. It sent up a big dust cloud, and they both fell to coughing.

"Sorry," Zell said, immediately contrite. "Sorry, sorry."

Quistis waved him off. She said, "You know, I never got why Fujin and Raijin followed him like they did. Or why Cid let him get away with so much."

Cid had, in his own weird way, adored Seifer Almasy. When other students fell to bullying new recruits just because they had silly hair and came from Balamb town, Cid gave them work duty in the garage. But to Seifer Almasy he'd given command of the DC, to "teach him responsibility." When other students failed their field exams, they were gently recommended for positions in private security somewhere, or offered internships in Timber with people Cid knew. But Seifer Almasy was given monitored detention and a talking to and reminded that Garden was his home, and allowed to try again, as needed. When other students carved up their sparring partners, Cid had them psychologically evaluated and put on probation. When Seifer Almasy did it, he got automatic therapy with Dr. K, no eval necessary, and a band-aid with a picture of a T-Rexaur on it.

Seifer had always cut an infamous figure in Garden, always had a bad name. Mostly it was because of his own bad attitude. But it was also because he'd always existed on some unfair higher plane, where nothing could make him drop in Cid's estimation and he never had to face the consequences of his actions.

"Fujin and Raijin were probably as messed up as he was," Zell said, so viciously he almost didn't sound like the nice Zell she knew. "And Cid? Screw Cid. You know he's hiding stuff from us on this, right?"

"Something more than the fact that we're probably going to be stealing a copy of the Crystal Pillar from Esthar?" Quistis said. Because Cid had come clean about that.

"I—I dunno," Zell said. "He just seems…off. I can feel it in my gut. That's why me and Squall are stealing his water."

Quistis blinked at him. 'Gut' was not a very good reason to mistrust a client. Particularly when the client was Cid. All their gut feelings were muddled when it came to Cid. And that was a little childish. The water thing. Sure, she was a Blue Mage, and could hold off all day out here with very little water. But Zell and Squall did have water of their own. She'd assumed they'd been draining Cid's stores because they were genuinely thirsty, not because they were acting like three-year-olds.

Possibly Squall wasn't. Possibly it was just Zell. Squall was actually very mature for his age.

At this point Squall came over. He'd gone back to the orphanage to rendezvous with their contact from Esthar, the one who would be analyzing the stair shard and comparing it to the Crystal Pillar. Now he showed up with more of Cid's canteens in tow and offered some to each of them.

"I know we have our own," Squall said, shrugging. "But we're using his stuff. Since I think he's hiding something."

Well. Scratch that last bit about maturity.

"That's what I think!" Zell said. "Something just feels off, you know?"

"He had a lot of books on Ancient Centrans in his house," said Squall. "I think he tried to clean them up before I got there. But he just put them in his bedroom. Which smelled like blood. You know. Metallic."

Wow, creepy. The blood thing. And also the fact that Squall had been poking around Cid's bedroom. Zell and Quistis stared at him.

"He didn't say I couldn't check out every room in the house," Squall said, like this wasn't ridiculous. Then, after a minute in which it seemed like he was deliberating something, he added, "I called Xu while I was up there. She said Rinoa was on a mission."

"Rinoa? Rinoa's not even a SeeD," said Zell.

"I know," Squall said slowly. "That's why it seemed weird. Xu said she'd told her she sensed magic use in Deling City, which violates the ceasefire. So she sent her out with Irvine and Selphie to pinpoint it. But I just… I worry that Rinoa's powers…. They scare her. So she doesn't tell me these things right away. She didn't, I mean. At the time she sensed the magic. Even though I was right there with her."

Quistis thought maybe Squall was trying to share some of his romantic woes with them, some moment in which he and Rinoa had not quite connected properly. She tried to express the appropriate amount of friendly sympathy. She said, "I'm sorry that happened to you, Squall."

Squall blinked at her. "It didn't happen to me. It happened to Rinoa. It didn't affect me much at all," he said. Then he clarified: "I'm telling you this because it's why I was looking through Cid's house. I wanted to find Edea's contact information. If anyone can talk to Rinoa about being a sorceress, it's Edea."

"That's a lot less skeevy than you just peeking into Cid's bedroom to sniff out blood," Zell told him.

Squall rolled his eyes. "It's going to be night soon," he told them. "Let's head back. I've set up cameras around the Egabi to record the closing sinkhole. They'll send the feed straight to Garden. Let's just get some rest tonight, in case our Esthar contact gets back to us and we have to head down into this thing tomorrow."

That seemed like sound reasoning. And Quistis and Zell were bored out of their minds at this point, so they welcomed it. They packed up their equipment. Quistis prepared herself to scale the side of the crater, but Squall said, "Oh, and there are stairs. Cid sucks," so thankfully, that was not something she had to endure twice. They sped back to the orphanage, set up camp again, started to analyze the day's results, ate from their stores (Quistis refused to let the boys steal Cid's food as well as his water), and – to cap off the most uneventful mission of all time – went to bed.

Quistis fell asleep first, she thought. Zell's mind was always buzzing, and it took a while for him to get to sleep. And Squall seemed like the type to lay awake and think about things a lot. So she was pretty sure her eyes were the first to close.

They were also the first to open. Because her fellow SeeDs were screaming. They were fast asleep. Knocked out completely. Definitely not with her, in the waking world.

But screaming. Just screaming and screaming and screaming.


	9. Chapter 9

"They're going to tell you your sister is dead," Renata told Raijin. "Don't believe them. And they're going to want you back in interrogation as soon as they think you're back in here—" here she tapped the side of his head. His mind. "Permanently."

Raijin couldn't suppress a shudder. It ripped through his body, made his ribs hurt more.

It wasn't the torture. SeeD cadets learned to withstand torture. No, it was the false sense of camaraderie from his torturer. It was the false friendliness. Raijin had friends, and they were not the best friends in the world, not by any means. They sometimes kicked him. Or tried to conquer the world on behalf of Galbadia and the sorceress Edea, and fucked up his life in the process. But Raijin stayed by them because they were his friends, and friendship meant something to him.

And the perversion of it meant something too, even if he didn't know what it was, and only knew that it was painful.

Renata stood and crossed to the door, checking that no one was listening. She locked it. Then she came back, and thrust something at him. Raijin couldn't really take it; his wrists were bound. So she held it up where he could see it. Some clear liquid in a vial.

"Here's the stuff they used on you," she said. "Analythymios. A sorceress' brew. Takes you right out of your head, the way a real Ripper might. I could only get this one vial. If they drop in unexpected, and you don't feel ready, I think I could trick Farica into thinking it's water. Ask her to give it to you. Then they'll think you're not recovered. It'll buy you some time. But don't use it right away! Use it when we need it. See, I have this plan—"

Someone pounded on the door.

"Farica!" came a familiar voice. An easy, confident, commanding voice.

The man in red.

"Our knight," said Renata, her face going tight with fear.

"Give it to me," Raijin begged.

"No!" Renata said. "If I give it to you now, then—"

"Give it to me."

She had a heart. She gave it to him.

* * *

That same night, Selphie finally made it back into central Deling City. It took until nighttime because getting into the city undetected involved extremely surreptitious train travel, which was hard in the current political climate. And so, when she arrived, she found the library doors closed. Opening hours were over. She considered breaking in to find Rinoa, but decided against it. Rinoa was probably back in her father's house by now.

And actually Selphie relished the thought of breaking into Caraway's place instead. Since Caraway had thrown her boyfriend in prison and all.

Selphie's memory wasn't the greatest. For obvious reasons. But the last time she'd met the general, she was fairly sure he hadn't been as domineering, as hard-edged, as dangerous as he'd been in the club, or even earlier in the day with his daughter. He was a terrible person; that went without saying. One of the main forces behind Galbadian supremacy, the kind of guy who was good face-to-face, who loved his kid and maybe his friends and possibly his mother and dog, but who could orchestrate serious damage if you let him. He was no doubt on a secret Xu blacklist of SeeD's most watched and least trusted.

But he did love his daughter. That much all the group agreed on, even if they never admitted it to Rinoa's face. He was always finding new ways to keep in touch, new excuses to contact Garden to see her. So why the extreme high-handedness? Why the open hostility? Why the nighttime raids, such a flashy and extreme way of handling a potential threat, sure to let the whole city what he was up to? And wasn't that not his usual way of doing things. Caraway had been a spymaster, like Missy had said. Even now, much of his work was in the shadows. He hired assassins. He didn't make a lot of noise when he shut down his political opponents. And he always covered his tracks so they couldn't be traced back to him.

So why in Hyne's patootie did he think it was acceptable to bust into a public place, kick Selphie's boyfriend when he was down, and then send poor Irvy to prison?

Not that Galbadian prisons were all that indomitable, or even anything new for their group.

Still, it was enough for Selphie to hold a grudge. She considered breaking in through the sewers, but figured Caraway knew they knew about that, and anyway that was how to get in without doing damage, and a little damage was half the fun. So instead she disabled the security system over the back wall, cast status ailments on the guard dogs (poor things didn't deserve it, but then it wasn't permanent, and they were bred to respond phoenix downs well after twenty four hours had passed; and someone was sure to find them by then), disabled the inner lawn security system, disabled the house security system (she'd had some training in disabling things after the whole missiles fiasco; it had only seemed prudent not to rely on luck all the time), opened the back door while the clueless maid stepped down into the cellar, and then, as an afterthought, doubled back around and broke a window for the hell of it.

Selphie had a nice healthy petty revenge streak when it came to assaults on her nearest and dearest.

She went in. The back door opened into the kitchen. Huge, with gleaming appliances that looked classically old-fashioned but were in fact pretty modern to go by their settings. Also very pretty tiled floors and walls, and in the corner a dusty red dog bowl with Angelo's name in curlicue print, and at the large island some plush red spinning stools. Selphie took a whirl. Fun. Rinoa must have had an awesome childhood in this kitchen. Everything was big and clean: the stove, the fridge, the cabinets. Selphie took a peep in each. Pies. Ice cream. Juicy pink ham with pineapple slices. Odd bubbly drinks in pink and red and pale orange bottles. Yum all around. She stole a pie and a bubbly drink and a slice of ham, then she ducked into the hall before the maid could come back.

The house was bigger on the inside than the outside, she thought. Had to be. Her parents' house in Trabia was more of a railroad-style cabin, tiny and cozy and homely in the extreme, with ancient plain wood paneling and lots of bedraggled rugs. But nothing so humble as a rug desecrated Fury Caraway's halls. He was a gleaming parquet and plush carpet man. His paneling was fancy and came with intricate trim. The whole place had a simultaneously cosmopolitan and antique air to it; Selphie thought she could recall Rinoa telling her it had been designed by some guy who'd betrayed Timber to the Galbadians ages ago, some aesthete asshole, and how this made it a national landmark.

There was nothing about the house that really screamed 'Rinoa', though, come to think of it. It was too much. It seemed false. Rinoa was not false.

Rinoa was... complex. She loved pink, and wore what had to be seven coats of mascara. She packed a spare dress and party shoes for use everywhere she went. She had a handbag full of dog treats. She could hold her own in battle, but then most sorceresses could; it wasn't a matter of training or discipline. And actually she resisted training and discipline all the time, as a matter of course, almost. She listened to others because she respected them and because she thought it was important to, naturally. But Selphie had long-ago realized, while watching Rinoa shamelessly mock Squall for the umpteenth time, that Rinoa's natural inclination was… Well. Trolly.

She didn't like to let people get away with their bad attitudes. She wasn't taken in by that. This made sense. She was into doing her own thing, fighting back, resisting. She often did this within a group, yes; she was a team player to the end. But she also had a fiercely autonomous rebel spirit. It was not selfish or anything; she had, after all, been willing to seal herself away to save the world. But it was personal, independent, self-focused. Rinoa looked inward more often than people thought she did, and she reflected. With no small amount of humor, either, since she could tell you ten million heartbreaking stories about Fury Caraway's yoke growing up, but Selphie suspected that Rinoa understood keenly the differences between herself, wealthy and grandiose, and the SeeDs, tough and mundane. So her stories were often watered down, made palatable, smaller and more relatable so that people wouldn't be upset or confused by them.

Rinoa's rebellious nature didn't keep her from caring about people and wanting to understand them, even when those people didn't care much about understanding her.

So. She probably hadn't deserved her friends acting like jerks to her. Selphie felt like a jerk. If she'd had a fancy house with fancy windows, Rinoa would have been well within her rights to smash one or two, as a kind of general chaotic comeuppance.

Selphie went upstairs. From what Caraway had told them earlier, she could deduce that Rinoa's room was probably in the East Wing. And Rinoa had left Angelo here this morning, since Deling City had weird rules about dog walking and she'd figured it would just be less trouble to have the maids care for her alongside the guard dogs. So Angelo would be in Rinoa's room somewhere, probably. Selphie held out a slice of ham.

"Aaaangelo," she called. "Here girl!"

She heard a whine and anxious canine scratching coming from a pair of tall double doors further down the hall. Gotcha. The doors were locked, so Selphie picked the locks. Then she let herself in.

Woah. Woah.

Rinoa's room was easily half as big as a B-Garden lecture hall. And pink. Very pink. Two walls of books, a wall of closet doors covered in beautiful art, a wall with huge windows and a huge fireplace, a perfect princess canopy bed in the center, records galore, clothes galore, fancy pink toe shoes hanging from a pretty brass hatstand, tuffets here and there with pink ribbons, a big fancy vanity, a huge bathroom just off the main room, and Julia Heartilly on the wall above the fireplace, looking every inch the singing vamp she'd been long before she married Fury Caraway, coated in furs, with a veiled hat and red lipstick and her daughter's dark eyes boring down into Selphie.

Selphie had, for a minute, the hilarious thought that Squall had probably gotten down and dirty in here, all surrounded by pink cushions and ribbons and his girlfriend's mom staring down at him.

Well, it wasn't like Squall didn't seem a little bit kinky.

Rinoa wasn't back yet. But she would be, because she wouldn't leave Angelo. So Selphie locked the door again, gave Angelo the ham, and settled in to wait.

She hoped Irvy was doing alright.

He couldn't be doing too badly. His father worked at the D-District. Selphie had only discovered this about two months ago , Irvine not being the most forthcoming soul in the world when it came to his background. She'd told him that maybe it would been relevant information at some point. Irvine said, "Nah, because he hardly ever took me to work or anything. I was always out and about, if you know what I mean."

What he meant was pretty clearly: "I don't want to talk about this, so I will make the vaguest of replies and let your mind go to the gutter. Then we can all pretend this isn't about my unwillingness to discuss my past, but is just another mention of what a ladies' man I am."

Boys.

Selphie had never had a boyfriend this serious before; she'd had a few childish kisses with some Trabia boys, but Trabia boys were different. They were straightforward and boring and not half as handsome or strangely considerate as Irvine. Nor were they half as likely to hide things, leer at other people, or stock up on literally every kind of porn under the sun (as far as she knew). So maybe it was a trade-off.

But still.

She could remember some things, about before. She could remember being impossibly close to him, terribly fond; simply assuming that Irvy was an annex of Selphie, the boy who would be at her side always. She couldn't remember the awful pain of being taken away from him, but her parents said it had happened. They'd adopted her, and she'd been prone to fits of uncharacteristic sadness due to missing the orphanage, and then she'd gone on that camping trip and found that GF and come back good as new, so they'd let it lie. They hadn't reminded her of what she'd lost, hadn't explained to her about being adopted, about crying out for her friends.

They'd thought that was for the best.

She didn't mind, so much. Her parents were good people. They were low-level T-Garden techs who could have made more of themselves if they'd hitched a ride back to their native Esthar, except that as far as they knew the city had disappeared, and also they'd had no idea what had become of Adel (they'd fled long before Laguna Loire arrived on the scene), and also it benefitted their daughter to have them working at Garden, because then they could watch over her, plus the low low Garden tuition became a flat zero if you worked for Garden. Which was good, because, the refugee settlements of Trabia being depressingly depressed places, a flat zero was about all they'd been able to afford.

They hadn't told her much about Esthar, growing up. At first she'd thought she just couldn't remember them telling her much, but then a quick check-in with them confirmed it; they just hadn't said anything. They'd taught her how to work some basic kinds of Estharian tech, but that was it. People didn't like to talk about Esthar under Adel; it wasn't done, and even now Selphie respected that.

No, instead her parents had taken her camping in the Vienne range. They'd gone ice skating and chocobo-hunting, catching the birds only to let them run free again through the forests. They'd gone to caverns in the mountains hung with beautiful icicles, where frozen lakes gleamed and twinkled like crystal. They'd traveled up to the top of the volcano range, the so-called birthplace of Hyne. They'd gone to town, now and then, via sled or ski, to try cheesecake and other local delicacies; they'd taken her to council meetings with the Shumi and sat her on their knee as they bargained; they three had spent impossibly green summers fishing and swimming, heedless of how cold Trabia's blue waters were even in July. They'd encouraged her to make friends, hosted student gatherings in their tiny cabin, made every birthday a resounding success.

Selphie'd had an exceptionally happy childhood after the orphanage.

Irvy, she was beginning to think, hadn't, so much.

Which made sense. Everybody in Trabia who'd been to Galbadia said it was the exact opposite of home – smog and vice and extreme wealth thrown up next to extreme poverty (which actually just sounded exciting, since in Trabia all they had was the poverty). Galbadia, people said, was twisted and horrible, as twisted and horrible as beautiful Esthar had become under Adel.

But Selphie had found that, aside from the part where the Galbadians had bombed her home, she'd liked this twisted continent. She'd liked traveling from Timber to Deling City to quaint Winhill. She liked the different kinds of faces, the snatches of old and long-suppressed languages. It was her old T-Garden social science textbooks come to life, everywhere something new and diverse, all kinds of vibrant places, even if they were tinged by war and conquering and Galbadian invasion.

And she found that Irvy, once she'd rediscovered him, had all the hallmarks of this vibrant living on him. He wasn't inherently intellectual– that was to say, not an exceptionally academic person or a bookworm at all, just someone who'd had to become sharp to keep up with Garden life – but he knew more about different kinds of places and people than he'd let on, had danced the night away with some bright, spangly new person nearly every night of his adolescence, had stunning recall for tales of cowboys and dames and adventurers and spies and national personalities. He was a city creature, as cosmopolitan as Rinoa, even if she knew the elite libraries and theaters and he knew the backstreets and bars.

He was interesting, all of a sudden. Not just little Selphie's shadow. Now someone who'd lived, who'd seen gambling dens and dance halls, who had secrets he didn't want to reveal. It was funny, because he thought it was his charm and ease that attracted her to him. But that wasn't it at all. She liked him even when he was tightly-wound over something that reminded him of the unfair situation back home, when he reacted without thinking to news about Deling City politics, when he dropped his façade to blather on about something socio-cultural and important to him.

He was very far away from the boy she'd known in those moments. Very far away from her. But he became, suddenly, someone she wanted to learn about, to connect with. Someone who could offer her more than other people could; not just a comfortable, beloved old friend, though he was and would always be that. But also a whole new being, a complement to her, not simply a compatriot.

She really, really liked him.

It was balls that other people didn't see him the same way she did, and thought they could just chuck him in prisons or sell him out to the media or refer to him in unflattering terms. Selphie could have beaten them all up, except that even as a SeeD you had to get orders that liberally permitted that kind of thing, and anyway, it wasn't like she could identify or hunt down everybody who gave Irvine a hard time.

But still. She was protective of the things she loved. Trabia. Irvine. Her friends.

Angelo whined and shoved her nose in Selphie's lap, begging for some pie. Selphie took a swig of her orange fizzy and scratched behind the dog's ears.

"Yeah," she said. "You've gotta stand by what's yours, right, Angelo?"

But Angelo wasn't just looking for pie. She was warning Selphie. The tap tap of multiple pairs of shoes came down the hall, and then there was a hand on Rinoa's doorknob, and muffled cursing when it proved to be locked. Selphie stood noiselessly and gathered up her food and drink, then went into the bathroom and locked that door. Angelo followed her but did not go in. Through the keyhole, Selphie could see the dog lying down in front of the door, as if to bar the way for whoever was coming in.

It was Caraway and the maid. The maid moved in like she was scared to enter the very room. Caraway moved in like he was looking for something.

"I already clean here as requested, twice a week—" the maid complained.

"Ordered," Caraway said shortly. "You mean ordered. It is not a request. She is my daughter."

"She's put up magic books," the maid said accusatorially, "On the shelves."

"Where else would she put them? In the bathtub? And they're not the really useful ones," said Caraway. "Those she would have taken back to Garden with her." He spat 'Garden' out like a curse. But then his face – or what Selphie could see of it – softened. "She'd read banned Timberi propaganda once, too. And when I took that away, she went straight to the source."

He gave a low chuckle, but it sounded more forced than anything.

"I think the girl is becoming a leader," Caraway said. "I think this should be evident to all."

"She's becoming something," said the maid.

Caraway scowled.

"Now, we need—" he began. Then he caught sight of something on the dresser. "Perhaps this," he said thoughtfully, picking it up. From her vantage point behind the keyhole, Selphie couldn't make it out. He pocketed it. "And something significant as well," he added cryptically. "Though it puzzles me more and more to guess what she cares about. Julia's portrait. And the dog, of course—"

Here Angelo gave a whine, as if she knew they were talking about her.

"—but both of those would be missed," said Caraway.

He strode to the closets and pulled the doors open on one. Clothes and tennis rackets, hockey sticks and shoes, hats and boxes upon boxes of papers and letters, scarves, more records, umbrellas and lace parasols, handbags and fans and fancy monogrammed suitcases.

"She doesn't care about any of this," Caraway said resignedly.

"That's right," came a cold voice from the doorway. "I don't."

Rinoa. She looked much the same as she had this morning, except she was carrying a red book and her scarf disguise had come out of her hair at some point. She'd tied it around her neck a little carelessly. Also, her sunglasses were pushed up on her head. It gave her the air of a pissed-off tourist, someone visiting foreign lands and expecting to find wonders, only to be surprised by moth-eaten bedsheets and cold fish for breakfast. Selphie knew that look; visitors to Trabia often looked like that.

"Get out," Rinoa said shortly. "You could at least wait until I'm not in town to claim all my stuff as yours."

The maid, taking note of her tone, squeaked a little. Caraway gave her an annoyed look. Then he held out his hands. "It is mine," he said. "But what's mine is yours."

Then he walked out. His daughter looked after him in disgust, rolling her eyes as the maid tried to squeeze past without touching her. Rinoa locked the door after them, then did something very strange. She backed against the door, breathing hard, like that encounter with her father had taken a lot out of her. Angelo got up and went to her, whining. Rinoa seemed not to notice. Then she slid down to the floor, looking for all the world more distressed than Selphie had ever seen her.

And Selphie had seen her at some very low points in their lives.

Selphie wrenched open the bathroom door, ran into the room, and said, "Rinoa! What's wrong?"

Of course, in her worry over her friend, she'd forgotten that Rinoa didn't know she was there. Rinoa gave a small surprised scream to find her in the room.

"Selphie?" she said. "Where's Irvine?" Her voice was very low and urgent, once she'd calmed down a bit.

"Your dad sent him to prison," Selphie said. She sat next to Rinoa on the floor, pulling a distressed Angelo into her lap to soothe the dog, and relayed the events of the evening. Rinoa, already looking dark, became more and more visibly angry as the story went on.

"I need Irvine most of all," she complained, burying her head in her hands.

Okay. That made no sense. Not that Irvy wasn't a good SeeD – he was. But the idea that there was some SeeD service Rinoa could get from him that she couldn't from Selphie was weird. Irvy was great and Selphie adored him. But between them, she was higher ranked. He hadn't even bothered to pass the SeeD test. There was nothing he knew that Selphie didn't.

Only. There was. Irvy was a former G-Garden cadet. And, for all that their initial story to Caraway had been a lie, from what they'd seen of Missy and Tulip, G-Garden was involved in this somehow. So, so maybe-

"Did you find something?" Selphie said excitedly. "About the illegal GF use?"

Rinoa stared at her. Rinoa staring at someone should not have been an uncomfortable experience. Rinoa was very pretty – she had fair skin like the old Dolletians, dark hair like the noblest of the Galbadian desert folk, dark Timber eyes – she looked like a doll, really. She had the kind of face you didn't like to look away from, because it was attractive and comforting all at once. Lovely. Not too lovely, not unnervingly lovely, not perfectly lovely, not world-destroyingly lovely, not like Edea or Ultimecia had been. Just nice.

But now there was something strange around her eyes, some odd, faraway, angry aspect, like she could see things Selphie couldn't, and like those things made her furious.

"The GF," Rinoa said tightly. "Yes. Well. I can't tell you here. We have to go. I'll tell you on the train. Or, well. No. I'll tell you at Garden."

"…at Garden?" Selphie asked uneasily. She reached out a hand to steady Rinoa, who was looking like she might start swaying a bit.

"Don't touch me," Rinoa snapped. "You can't touch me right now."

And the weird thing was, she didn't say it in Principle, the standard language everybody from Esthar to Galbadia spoke, even if sometimes the accents shifted a bit across oceans and borders. She said it in her other language. Her special language, the one no one spoke, but that she could make you understand if she felt like it.

So it came out like: You kan't touch me right now.

Selphie, unpleasant experience with Ultimecia aside, didn't mind the whole hard k thing. She thought it was kind of funny, usually. But right now, for some reason, it felt really creepy.

* * *

Squall was dreaming.

Squall rarely dreamed. Or maybe he just didn't remember his dreams. He thought it was a GF thing: that they snatched up dreams like they did memories, maybe. It didn't much matter either way. The last time he'd dreamt, he'd been a moron. It had been Ellone's fault. His adoptive sister: she'd wanted to change the past, and also possibly introduce to Squall to the riveting reality that his father was alive, successful, in Esthar, and didn't have two brain cells to rub together.

Thanks, Ellone.

This had been his first thought, when he'd fallen asleep in Centra and opened his eyes to discover that he was someplace else completely, and also someone else. Thanks, Ellone. Thanks so very much.

He didn't hate Ellone. Far from it. One of the first things he'd remembered, once he'd realized he'd been forgetting things at all, was how much he'd loved Ellone. How much Ellone had loved him. But, love notwithstanding; she still thought it was fun to send him crashing through time and space to fill roles he never wanted to fill. She'd once made him live his dreams as Laguna Loire, leg-cramping sorceress-defeater and official Leonhart family sperm donor. And now she was doing it again, he thought. Because when his head hit the pillow, he became someone else.

Someone familiar.

He knew those hands. Long fingers, criss-crossed with scars from the earliest days of training. No, maybe not. These were more banged up than he remembered. Too scarred. But he thought he knew those muscled forearms, too. Even if now they were more ropey than muscled, skinnier than before. Still, he recognized that small, pale birthmark just underneath the knobbly bone on the right wrist. He'd seen it many times, as he'd caught sight of that hand adjusting its grip on the blade.

That blade. He knew that blade.

It had been a gift from Cid. Like his own. But his own had been upgraded countless times during the war and the past seven months. While Hyperion remained, essentially, the same blade that had sliced open Squall's forehead all those months ago.

Seifer.

He was Seifer.

The scars and the blade were only the first clues. Squall would have known Seifer anywhere even without all that. People thought Seifer and Squall were inherently different. They were not. They never had been. They had never been opposites, only inversions of each other. They'd once had the same streak of powerful stubbornness, the same determinedly standoffish independence, the same dismissive attitude towards their fellow men. Only Squall had grown beyond that, had changed and matured. And Seifer had…not. He remained a stubborn, easily-manipulated child; he'd become not wiser, but more selfish, more vicious, more monstrous. He was Squall fourteen months ago, gone wrong instead of right. Horribly, horribly distorted. The vision of what Squall himself might have become; the essential material of a lost, abandoned young man all there waiting for development, but it had not developed with firm Cid Kramer thrust into the heroic spotlight. Instead, it had been twisted into a tool, something pitiful.

And even if they hadn't been so similar at heart, hadn't had the same starting point merely to arrive at different conclusions – Squall still would have known Seifer under any circumstances. Because Seifer had always been one of the only constants in his life; even if Squall hadn't always realized it, Seifer had always been there. Always. Frequently mouthing off about the very things in life that annoyed Squall. Frequently mouthing off in ways that annoyed Squall. But still there. Loud, and bright, and familiar: an uncomfortable habit and a habitual comfort, because he'd never left, had simply gone with Squall from the orphanage to Cid's care to proper classes to SeeD training. Squall had tolerated and even liked him, in his own way; he'd never paid Seifer as much attention as Seifer maybe would have liked, but it wouldn't have occurred to him to. A nod here, a silent agreement there, a regular brush-off, all this had been the sum of what Squall had to offer Seifer. And he'd really thought that that was all Seifer wanted from him, anyway.

Seifer had always demanded everyone's attention; that was just who he was. But to Squall in particular he was connected, as a rival and as a constant presence. Seifer's 'death' had jolted Squall, had made him feel queasy and horrible for the first time in his memory. It had been like losing a part of himself, some constant but oft-noticed body part, an unruly limb, or a blood vessel or something, the part of Squall that had always been there and had always kept him pumped, on his toes. Seifer's death told Squall that he, too, could die. He himself could vanish, if it were possible for the world to remove someone as ever-present, as familiar as Seifer. As recognizable.

So that was the who. The alterna-knight. The lapdog knight. The orphanage gang's own resident troublesome mystery.

The one person missing in Squall's life right now. Weird as that was to admit about Seifer.

The how was, as established, probably Ellone.

But when was he, exactly? He had no idea. Sometime in the past seven months, probably, going by the scars. And why was he here? He had even less idea. He'd spoken earlier with Ellone while calling into Esthar; she hadn't mentioned that she'd be dropping by to torment his sleep again. Although at least now she was waiting for him to go to sleep naturally, instead of booting him into unannounced and unconsented-to magic father/son bonding naptime.

But this was not his father. This was Seifer.

And Squall had no idea where Seifer was. It looked completely unlike any place he'd ever been. And he'd been, at this point, all over every square corner of the earth. He'd even been in cells before. That had been courtesy of Seifer, actually.

Just not in cells like this.

In a way, it reminded him of Ultimecia's castle. Old. The bars were twisted works of art, like someone's idea of a sick joke, iron bent into a kind of crowded cityscape, with small people scurrying to and fro, grimaces carved into their faces, and strange creatures, gargoyles pulling carriages. A beautiful vista, intricate and impenetrable.

The interior of the cell, too, was beautiful. No shackles and no electric torture for Seifer. He had gleaming metal floors, stone walls with more grimacing figures carved into them, a low table piled with books, a toilet behind a jade-green metallic screen rising from the floor like an exotic grove of jewels, and even a proper bed, a canopy with green hangings, so pristine and perfect that it reminded Squall of Rinoa's princess canopy back in Deling City.

There was a symbol on the hangings that was also familiar. It looked a little like the Garden emblems. But it wasn't that. It was off, somehow.

He did not have time to examine it. Seifer was not looking in that direction. Instead, he was furiously swinging his gunblade, going through paces, as much a caged beast here as he'd been back at Balamb, when stone walls and iron bars hadn't been his jailers, but rules and restrictions.

Why had someone jailed him? Or. No. That was dumb. There were a million reasons to jail Seifer at this point. Why had someone jailed him and not told Squall about it?

Squall felt fury spike through him.

Seifer was – well. He didn't know how to explain it. His. Cid's. Theirs. Garden's. Squall had assumed he'd find his way back to Garden eventually—oh, not by crawling back, like Zell seemed to think he would; not out of desperation, as Quisis had once suggested he might; not willingly, really, since Squall couldn't imagine Seifer ever showing up anywhere with his tail between his legs. No. But still. Squall had been sure that Seifer would be back. Squall had assumed that Fate or Cid would handle it, like Fate and Cid handled everything else. Seifer was meant to be at Garden. He was a part of the fabric of the place, like the hot dogs and the detentions and the rank smell near the Training Center exit. He'd betrayed the place, yes. He was owed payback for that. But that was just it. It was Garden, above any other place, that owed him payback. It was Garden, more than trampled Galbadia and destroyed Esthar, that ought to have the power to deal with Seifer.

Garden had always been Seifer's home, after all. Garden had made him. Seifer Almasy was Garden gone wrong, and therefore it was Garden's business to set him right.

And Squall did mean to set him right. Not kill him. There was a reason Cid had always given Seifer chance after chance: Seifer had strength, and talent, and promise. Yes, he was reckless and arrogant and his personality was downright awful. But Squall knew better than anyone that you could be a real piece of crap and still put some good into the world. And Seifer owed it to the world to do just that, now. He owed it to Galbadia, to Esthar, to Rinoa.

And to his fellow Garden residents, the people he'd turned against.

The papers assumed Squall plotted furious vengeance against Seifer every night. He did not. He never had. He was not cruel. He didn't want to kill Seifer. He didn't think that would fix anything, and anyway, he didn't know for sure that Seifer had been totally in control. He'd been turned inside out by Ultimecia. He'd been nothing but wild-eyed, haunted, and crazy at the end. Squall was not inhuman; he understood that, while what Seifer had done was undeniably wrong, the truth was a complex thing,

Squall wouldn't kill him. Squall would throw a SeeD uniform on him; he had no problem with that; Irvine was a SeeD, so it wasn't like passing the test mattered for anything nowadays. And then after that? Squall thought maybe Seifer might like to try his hand at cleaning up some Lunar Cry monsters, dealing with the Galbadians, speaking to the press in Rinoa's defense, getting his penance plastered all over the papers, his picture on every newsstand, handling frantic calls from the Estharians, paying court to Xu in her worst moods.

Alright. Maybe Squall was a little cruel and inhumane. It probably said something about him that the worst punishment he could come up with was exactly what Fate and Cid had tossed on him. Only in his case it was supposed to be some kind of reward.

But either way he would have used Seifer. Squall wondered if maybe people didn't know that. If this was why the people who were holding Seifer were keeping it from him and Garden. They thought he would put Seifer in a cell. He would not. This was not the D-District, this was not some fetid hole where Galbadian political prisoners came to die, this was not the blank white laboratory pens of Esthar, this was not even a Garden detention cell. It was more like a luxury suite, and only the livid buzz of Seifer's thoughts, the mental acknowledgement Seifer gave himself, angry and disappointed, confirming that he'd been captured, told Squall that this was not, in fact, just a really weird room with fancy decorative ironwork.

Since the world thought Squall Leonhart hated Seifer Almasy (as much as Seifer hated him? Squall really did not know; oddly enough, he suspected Seifer didn't hate him and never really had), the world assumed Squall would want to see him mistreated. So now that he wasn't being mistreated, just brought to heel like a crated dog, no one thought to alert Squall. Possibly visions of horrifying headlines danced in their heads: **Garden Commander Beheads Rival; Leonheartless Reveals Inner Savagery!**

Squall told himself that he did not care very much about what the papers said. He was not Rinoa; he did not have the kind of sweet temperament and sassy delivery that could defend itself should it be criticized for collecting gossip rags. And anyway that was pointless masochism. But still. The very thought that someone else might even contemplate such a headline made him gloomy.

As if to punctuate this, Seifer gave a growl and massacred the air in a vicious fashion.

It was a surprisingly good thrust on his part. Seifer had never used his reach properly, preferring to rely on flashy chi attacks like a cheat, and privately Squall had seen it as a bit of a shame. Seifer had a powerful, long-limbed body; if he'd ever bothered to actually think for two seconds, instead of just jumping straight into raw power and displays of pointless heroism, he would have roundly bested Squall during training. As it was, he'd mostly seemed to fall into using his whole body every once in a while, out of sheer dumb luck or brainless instinct, and so he'd lost as often as he'd won.

Seifer had no one to beat him now. In short time he became bored. He set Hyperion down with care on the table, then retreated to the bed. He put his head in his hands, panting hard, as he'd been working himself pretty intently.

His mind was very carefully blank the whole time, which was odd. It wasn't that Seifer wasn't thinking. The odd, furious, impulsive curse came to the forefront every now and then. But, for the most part, his thoughts were very very boring. He was thinking of his exercises. Then Quistis's worst and most pointless lectures, recited rote from the textbook, the kind of teaching only Quistis could get away with without inciting mass disrespect from the student body. Then the steps for escaping from a Ruby Dragon in the training center, basic training manual II. He was, Squall realized, trying to calm himself. His thoughts were military, precise, almost meditative. Because beneath the surface he was furious, but someone had thrown him in a cell (turnabout was fair play, Squall supposed), and rendered him powerless, and even Seifer Almasy, forever a furious little boy at heart, had enough sense to realize that anger was going to get him nowhere in this scenario.

Then something odd happened. An image flashed in Seifer's head. People. All arrayed in a curious formation, like minor officers in the army, assembled to mount an attack. Not the Galbadians. Not blue armor and guns. Not basic incompetence roped into order and set on Vinzer Deling's enemies.

No. It was a more ragtag bunch than that. Strange weapons. Grim faces. Odd costumes. Old-fashioned.

But familiar, somehow. Which was weird, because Squall was very sure he'd never seen this group before. Maybe the familiarity came from Seifer?

It had to. It did. The vision, or memory, whatever it was, launched Seifer down a completely different path. Heroic sagas. He knew every single one, from the most overlooked knights to the most notorious, which Squall supposed was unsurprising. In his thoughts Seifer named the people in this mental formation, named them as knights. _Iseult Neve, Knight to Balamb sorceress Illyria _wasa fine-boned woman in blue, in the back_._ Seifer considered her end._ Died to see her sorceress safely away from the machinations of the Centrans._ Then a ragged, hideous man standing nearby. _Her sworn enemy, Ignotus Romulus, Knight to Firion, who was burnt alive by rebel tribes in Esthar. Daemon Carteret, Knight to Domitia, who'd fallen in battle against the Timberi._

And on and on and on. Naming the knights in his fantasy army.

Was this another calming mechanism? People generally got put in cells to teach them regret, not to spur a renewed love of old children's stories. But then Seifer was a stranger to regret, and an eternal child besides. So jailing him was never going to have the desired effect. Whoever his jailers were, they clearly didn't understand him very well, not half as well as Squall did. Squall felt, oddly enough, slightly pleased by that. And beyond this he felt pleased that Seifer felt no regret.

Regret was completely unlike Seifer. If Seifer had felt regret, it would have been disappointing. Seifer was, after all, as thoroughly stubborn as Squall was. He saw things through to the end; he felt little sorrow or guilt over his actions. He was not programmed that way. He never had been. And it didn't help that Squall and Seifer both had been raised the Cid Kramer way: the moral relativist way. There was no 'right' or 'wrong.' There was only your side, and somebody else's. Only a side that paid you, and a side that didn't.

Only. Only what Seifer had done was wrong. Somewhere along the way, Squall had come to a slow, careful, thoughtful acceptance that it was so. Seifer had betrayed his Garden, fucked over his friends, attacked and attempted to harm Rinoa, who had only ever had faith in him… It was wrong. He'd picked the wrong side. The bad side. There was a bad side; that was a thing that could exist, Cid's moral relativism notwithstanding. And that bad side? Had been Seifer's side.

So why was Squall relieved to find that Seifer felt no regret over it? It didn't make sense.

Only it did. Squall could understand why Seifer had gone bad. Sort of. They'd both been raised to ignore right and wrong, and to pursue their goals at the cost of nearly everything else. Kramer-style. Common sense said Seifer was long-overdue some regret, because his goals had cost lives across Balamb, Trabia, and Esthar; and because, in the end, his goals had been evil. Common sense said that Seifer feeling regret would be a good thing. That maybe, Seifer needed to learn, as Squall had, that that there were limits to Cid Kramer's moral relativism.

Only, for Squall, those limits were hazy things. He was still trying to define them. Rinoa helped him out as best she could. Her limits were mighty fortress walls; within, the Good: Timber, their friends, human liberty, compassion, dignity for all. Without the fortress walls? Caraway, Galbadian despotism, animal abuse: all that which Rinoa felt, deep in her heart of hearts, was truly Evil. But Squall was not up to constructing ethical fortresses. Even his love for Rinoa, the best thing in his life so far, was something that he understood might take him to very dark places.

The papers said she might turn into Ultimecia. Unlikely, Squall thought. But then he didn't think about it much, because who cared if she did? She'd been more patient with him than he deserved, yet tough enough with him that he counted himself lucky. She'd stayed with him every step of the way even though she hadn't had to; Ultimecia was SeeD's business, not hers. She'd rescued him from Time Compression. And he simply liked her. She was pretty, funny, brave, clever, and kind.

There was really very little he wouldn't do for her. If she became Ultimecia, then he, like Seifer, would be Ultimecia's knight. Wrong. Evil. But there you had it; Squall knew he was capable of that kind of thing.

Which made it hard to build up a very firm sense of right or wrong. To name his limits. It was almost with relief that he realized that he wasn't alone in being slightly immoral. Seifer Almasy was twice as immoral as he was; he'd served Ultimecia, and felt no regret over it whatsover. He certainly did not demarcate good and bad; he saw no limits; he was not thinking on the evils he had wrought in any way.

He was thinking of the ancient Knights. That was all.

_Kazamai Sprite, Knight to Zigane. Killed by the Nah. Jana Ki, Knight to Eeya, hung by the Ancient Dolletians._

Oh. Death. He was thinking of the deaths of Knights.

Seifer, in characteristic Seifer fashion, had leapt ahead of Squall in an almost frustrating way, clearly unthinkingly, unaware that he'd even accomplished it. He was not naming Knights. He was naming his limits. He was naming the consequences of his actions, the results of doing evil. Maybe he didn't regret doing wrong because what he'd done was wrong. But he had to have some kind of regret motivating him, or else he wouldn't be punishing himself in this fashion.

It was a self-imposed punishment, this recitation. It had to be. Because of course Knights, particularly failed Knights, jailed Knights, Knights who'd served evil ends and made powerful enemies, did not get happy endings. And someone had stuck Seifer in a cell to teach him just that. And Seifer, who had always made a big production of never learning anything under Quistis Trepe, had to be internalizing the lesson.

_Brothers Telemachus and Oppius Hillfin, executed by the Dolletians._

Did Seifer think these people would execute him? Had they executed him? Had Ellone sent Squall back to see the moment of his death?

The thought sent a jolt through Squall. They could not kill Seifer. No. Squall had a plan for Seifer. He had a way of making Seifer theirs again: Garden's, the orphanage gang's. Seifer had dues to pay to them, his earliest family, the ones he'd tried to get away from, abandoned, sold out. And no one was going to snatch him up before he paid those dues. No one could. The very idea was inconceivable. Fate and Kramer could not allow it. Squall wouldn't allow it.

Squall hoped, suddenly, powerfully, with an intensity of feeling that he rarely allowed himself to acknowledge, that somehow he hadn't allowed it. That somehow, in these past seven months, while he'd been bored out of his mind entertaining Galbadians in Timber, dealing with minor cadet peccadilloes, handling Xu, avoiding Laguna, he hadn't overlooked something crucial. Seifer. Garden's loose end. Squall, tired, overwhelmed, focused on so many bothersome new friends and a new girlfriend, had been in favor of sitting back and letting Fate and Cid Kramer handle Seifer, bring Seifer back to them.

But, fuck, that was a stupid idea.

When did Fate and Cid Kramer ever deliver anything good? All the good things in Squall's life (named: Rinoa, Ellone, Selphie, Zell, Quistis, Irvine) he'd had to work for, to struggle past his own defenses to even acknowledge. While the bad things – the infamy, the reporters, the heavy workload, the horrible crushing responsibility, the sense that now more than ever he had to watch what he said and did – all this had been tossed on him by Fate and Cid, without him really wanting or working for it at all. The bad stuff in life just came at you. You didn't seek it out, not any more than Seifer, bright troublesome spark that he was, more alive that Squall had probably ever given him credit for, would ever seek out death.

_Batibat Kerr, Knight to Adel_, Seifer continued.

He seemed to be struggling to bring up that vision again, that memory of his curious army. A Knight army. Some force Seifer had constructed in his head, whimsical and weird, of all the failed dreams that had ever inspired him. But he didn't get to it. The vision was gone. And all that was left in its place was Seifer's angry, knife-sharp spike of confusion.

Was Kerr there?

Why it was important to him that he include Kerr, Squall had no idea. Unless Seifer was a weird completionist when it came to collecting dead Knights (it seemed like him, actually; Squall vaguely recalled an obsessive neatness about his rival, a need to have everything and everything in its proper place, that had sometimes bordered on the psychotic), and wanted to count every single one in his gallery of Doomed Evildoers.

Kerr was certainly one you wanted to have. Squall had only the vaguest recollection of his history lessons on the woman. GFs and Instructor Trepe's own bored distaste for the subject meant that he had internalized only those facts necessary to take the test, and then very happily lost all that knowledge as soon as he'd received a passing grade. But he did know that Kerr had been the agent of some of Adel's worst cruelties, just as Seifer had been Ultimecia's. Besides this, Kerr had been the most recent Knight before himself and Seifer. There were still people who remembered her. Probably. Maybe. If she hadn't killed them.

_What happened to Kerr?_

Squall, of course, did not know, and couldn't have told Seifer if he had known. But he could see why it was relevant. If the consequences of his actions had finally come to Seifer's doorstep, then it might be useful to know what the consequences had been for the other most infamous Knight in recent world history.

_People said she had weird powers. Wasn't just a fighter. Was almost as destructive as a sorceress herself. She was responsible for the annihilation of the upper class, the deaths of the scientists who happened to dissent, and for the routing of the plainsmen_, Seifer recited, not without some disapproval. The disapproval was slightly hypocritical, given what Seifer himself was responsible for.

For his part, though, Squall put Seifer's crimes aside for the moment and focused on Kerr. He vaguely recalled something about her committing tribal massacres. The Routing of the Plainsmen was probably that. Only more poetically put. Quistis had been in the habit of listing history without any poetry whatsoever, just names and dates and very large death tolls. Trust Seifer, dreamer that he was, to put a grandiose kind of spin on it.

_She had more finesse that her sorceress_, ran Seifer's thoughts. _Adel cared nothin' for the law, ran Esthar on impulse. Kerr liked law. Law could do what she needed done. Make it impossible for enemies to escape the city. Keep 'em from jobs, keep their kids from attending schools. Deling under a different name, she was. Political. Then she disappeared. People say Adel got rid of her._

'Killed by his own sorceress' didn't seem a likely end for Seifer. Given that Squall and company had put an end to Seifer's sorceress before she could rip apart Seifer's mind any more than she already had. So Squall had to wonder why Seifer was dwelling on it.

_But what if she just….got away?_

Oh.

It made more sense now. Hope. Kerr represented foolish hope. Kerr, who'd brought death to doorsteps across the Estharian continent, meant something very different to Seifer. Go figure. Seifer was contrary like that, stupid like that. He'd lost the war, laid waste to two of the most powerful empires on the planet, attacked Garden, and was sitting in a cell. And yet he still thought of ways to escape his fate, to fight it.

Which, it suddenly occurred to Squall, was really the unexpected difference between the two of them. Fate had thrown a yoke on Squall, and Squall, who did not like bending at the knee, had chosen to go along with it. While Seifer had stayed on the path of the reckless dreamer, the arrogant defier of Fate. What possible end could he expect, having done that?

As if to answer the question, there came a rattling from the bars, and the sound of jangling keys. Seifer tensed, reached for his gunblade. Why his jailers had given him his gunblade was beyond Squall. Sure, in the D-District they were incompetent enough to throw everybody's weapons in a pile in the hall. But at least they took them away. Otherwise prisoner riots would have been easy to pull off.

Well. Easier.

_If they magic me again, then I can at least cut one open_, Seifer thought furiously.

Right. Magic. How? Garden was fast becoming the center of the world's magic use. Xu had left some GFs with the Galbadians, but Squall knew she was itching to pull them away. She and Cid didn't really like magic in anybody else's hands; letting the Galbadians junction at all was just a matter of diplomacy. But did this mean that Seifer was with the Galbadians? Or were there GFs, and consequently magic users, that Garden didn't know about?

If there were, for all that Squall wasn't as passionately committed as to stockpiling magic as his fellow Garden leaders were, he needed to hunt them down. It wasn't that they had GFs. It was that they were using those GFs to enact vigilante justice on his rival. And it turned out, though it was a fairly big to surprise to Squall to discover it, that he was downright territorial, about that. And if they turned out to be Galbadians, then he was twice as territorial, because then they were doing it right under his nose, and were clearly scapegoating besides. Seifer hadn't become anything Galbadia hadn't given him the tools to create. If he'd been a monster (and he had been), then that monster had been a Galbadian pet run off its leash.

But the hand that poked through the bars of Seifer's cozy little cage did not seem Galbadian. Or. At least, not your standard Galbadian. It was too dark. Darker even than Kiros Seagill. And it was holding keys.

Which seemed like the last thing to offer a prisoner you wanted to see executed for reasons of scapegoating vigilante justice.

"Peace, Sir Knight," said a woman's voice. "Fujin sent me."

And there lay the other big difference between Seifer and Squall. Squall was only just now learning how to have friends.

Seifer had always had them.

* * *

Rexa the card queen's father painted cards. And no one else was allowed to; the family had a monopoly going. Which made no sense for a family that was no one, powerless, just standard Dolletian-based midlands trash, but there it was. The perks of having a sorceress in the family.

The other perk of having a sorceress in the family was that she understood secrecy. She kept quiet when asked; it was just what she would ask other people to do for her.

So when her guest told her that no, she would prefer not to alert Garden, against her better judgment, Rexa did not.

Even though obviously she should have. It was the middle of the night. Her father and siblings and son were asleep. Only she awoke, and it was because she was startled by an awful noise from the studio. It took her a minute to realize, sending out tendrils of sensing and scanning magic, that it was only her guest, disoriented, having obviously just awoken from a terrible nightmare.

Rexa dithered for a little bit, tidying up her son's things, checking in on him as he slept. She understood that these Garden types were not often forthcoming with their feelings, and ought to be afforded some time to gather their thoughts. It took all kinds to make a world, even emotionally-stunted mercenary kinds, and Rexa would know, as she'd been all over the world. So she would let a few moments pass before going down to the studio; it was only polite. And, anyway, she preferred a stiff upper lip, preferred not to deal with too much crying and carrying on. It wasn't like she had some Deling City princess in the house, with their twee ways of speaking and their spoiled, snotty attitudes and their cutesy upper-class spice names: Caraway, Calaminth, Ruta.

Awful.

Rexa's family despised Galbadians and Deling City. Always had.

Good thing this one was the exact opposite of all that. Sensible. Reserved. Straight with you. Rexa fixed some cocoa for two, then went downstairs, full of warm feeling for her guest.

And found the studio a shambles, paint and paper everywhere, red splatters on the wall that it took her a half-second to realize were not blood, only Scarlet No. 47.

Her guest held a card aloft. There were no weapons or anything nearby, and Rexa's magic didn't tell her to be wary, so she wasn't. It was a little bit of post-traumatic sociopathy, that was all. Rexa's sister had been the same, when she'd come back from her first Garden field mission.

"It's okay, sweetheart," Rexa said, a little awkwardly, because she wasn't by nature a terribly comforting person. But still. She tried to soothe. In fact, she projected soothing, calming magic. She even considered a sleep spell, but dropped that thought when she saw the card.

It was a new card. A figure in a red cowl. Everything hidden but the eyes. That was it. Nothing more. Not poorly painted, but there was nothing inherently scary about the image.

But the values. Those were scary. A on top. A on the right. A on the bottom. A on the left. A winning card in every way. Something you couldn't defend against, or convert to your side.

Rexa pried it out of Fujin's hand. Fujin was not a card-maker, and hadn't thought to name it, to put the attribution in old Nah along the bottom edge, as was custom with first-edition Triple Triad cards.

Fujin just told her what it was.

"NETHER RIPPER," Fujin said. "NETHER RIPPER."


End file.
